Above and Beyond

The documentary takes up the year 1948. In that year a group of pilots volunteered. The pilots were American Jews. Many among them were airmen who had flown in the Second World War. They went to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. What they joined was called Machal. Machal gathered volunteers who came from abroad. That decision carried a risk for them. They could lose their citizenship because of an embargo the Truman administration had imposed. The film tells their story in their own words. The account rests on archive material as well. Nancy Spielberg produced it and Sophie Sartain wrote it, in Roberta Grossman’s Israeli, British and American coproduction of 2015.