The Last Sermon: Life After the Mike’s Place Bombing

This is a relatively rare documentary sequel, sort of. Back in 2003, Jack Baxter was filming a doc about the Tel Aviv blues club Mike's Place, when he was seriously injured by a suicide bombing attack. If any filmmaker is entitled to take Islamist terrorism personally, it would be him. Instead, he set off on an extended mission to understand the radicalization process. The result is a very personal investigation that is frequently complicated by his own emotions that Baxter documents with his previous production partner, Joshua Faudem, in The Last Sermon, which releases tomorrow on VOD.

Mike’s Place was an oasis of good music and good cheer that was ripped apart by two British-born Hamas terrorists on April 30, 2003, while Baxter was filming in the club. He was seriously injured in the attack, so local crew-member Faudem finished the film that ultimately became Blues by the Beach. Baxter still carries a cane and pieces of organic shrapnel as a result of the bombing. He also lost good friends, so he could not simply walk away, emotionally or intellectually.

With Faudem on-board as his producer and Sancho Panza-sounding board, Baxter visits various refugee shelters and mosques throughout Europe seeking to understand the root causes of fundamentalist radicalization. Their ultimate goal was to score interviews of the British family members of the Mike’s Place terrorists, who were criminally prosecuted for not revealing their terrorist plans.

However, Baxter is not a very probing interviewer, because he is so prone to be led by his emotions. Initially, he largely accepts the answers he gets from imams, social workers, and refugee musicians at face-value. That gives the film a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde effect when he and Faudem arrive in Manchester in the days following the 2019 Arena bombing. Suddenly, the same Baxter who broke bread and jammed with displaced musicians gets spitting mad at anyone unwilling to take the war directly to Daesh (ISIS).

Yet, as the film progresses, it maybe inadvertently illustrates how complicated and often disappointing the world is when you approach it with Baxter’s appealing humanist embrace. Some people will reach back, but others will take advantage of openness to commit atrocities. Baxter is a charismatic guy with a fascinating backstory of his own, but he could have used a foil to ask tough questions like: “do countries have a right to control their own borders?” and “why is Islam so predisposed to this kind of radicalization?” Some of Baxter’s old friends from Mike’s Place, who express skepticism regarding the project, could have filled that role effectively.

Blues By the Beach: On Screen and Online

In the past, there has been the occasional bloodshed in blues jukes, sometimes even becoming the stuff of legend. These days, one would hardly expect even a little fist-fighting in a blues club, much less a homicide-suicide bombing. In Israel however, that is never outside the realm of possibility. Filmmaker Jack Baxter learned this all too well while making Blues By the Beach, a documentary which plays May 5th at the Two Boots Pioneer, and is also available online as part of the digital delivery revolution.

Baxter originally travelled to Israel with plans of filming a documentary about a terrorist facing trial. When he arrived at the courthouse, Baxter found his prospective subject was already well covered by another filmmaker, and frankly not that interesting. Baxter planned to pack up his gear and leave, but happened to wander into a Tel Aviv blues club on his supposed last night. He found Mike’s Place, a beachfront club featuring a mix of blues and related blues-rock.

The managing co-owner, Gal Ganzman, had created an oasis of American ambiance that drew a decidedly mixed patronage. Everyone in Mike’s spoke English, but never discussed religion or politics. When Baxter saw Israelis, Palestinians, Americans, and Europeans, all peacefully coexisting at Mike’s, he figured he had his story. Baxter hired bartender Joshua Faudem and Faudem’s Czech girlfriend, Pavla Fleischer, to be his crew and started interviewing the people of Mike’s, expecting a narrative to take shape. Unfortunately, it did.

On April 30, 2003 a suicide bomber walked into the club, changing the lives of everyone there and tragically altering the trajectory of the film. Three people lost their lives that night: Dominque Hass, a Mike’s waitress covering for someone else on her night off, and musicians Yanay Weiss and Ran Baron. Seriously injured in the blast was the bouncer, Avi Tabib, who spotted the bomber, preventing far greater carnage, and Baxter himself.

The director would become the subject, as Faudem assumed the helmer's duties. Each death is painful for the people of Mike’s, but the loss of Hass is particularly shocking to the audience. Bright and attractive, Hass was established as one of the lead voices of Beach before the cowardly attack. Losing her presence in the film makes Beach feel unbalanced, incomplete—which is the point. That is the messy reality of terrorism and the resulting sense of loss.

Beach is not a film of strikingly composed images. Rather it was about having the camera pointed in the right direction when something important happened, and capturing the drama unfolding. This is not an academic exercise, offering excuses for the killers (who happened to be British nationals). It is about a savage act of violence, and the efforts to deal with the resulting emotional and physical scars. It is as real as it gets.

Faudem did indeed finish the film, but the experience would prove trying. Baxter recovered to see the film into release as co-producer and will be taking questions at Two Boots after the screening. It turned out to be a painfully intimate film, showing the effects of terrorism in very concrete human terms. Mike’s Place looks like the sort of spot we would hang at if we were in Israel. The music we hear in the film by Barry Gilbert and Sobo is actually pretty good and the people seem friendly. That is why Beach is so disturbing. It introduces us to a place we, like Baxter, would feel so comfortable in, and then see it senselessly bombed out of sheer hate. Beach is a brutally honest film, well worth seeing.