The new film by Israeli director Amos Gitai, Rabin, the Last Day, is one of this year’s strongest contenders for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

A powerful, uncompromising film, Rabin, the Last Day details the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Israeli’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on its 20th anniversary. Stylistically, Rabin, the Last Day is a hybrid: it starts off as a documentary, with an extensive interview with Shimon Peres, continues with a montage of archive footage from the day of the homicide and then develops into a gripping re-enactment of the investigations that followed Rabin’s death, sourced directly from the investigations’ original proceedings.

In a few occasions throughout the film, documentary and staged reconstruction are seamlessly blended, such as when the camera follows the dying Rabin inside his car and travels with him and his bodyguards to the hospital. It is a radical and purely cinematic act that enriches the film and allows the audience to be a witness to the unseen moments of Rabin’s tragedy.

The film’s main concern is to reconstruct the event from a contemporary perspective and to raise questions regarding the responsibilities that led to the homicide. Amos Gitai knows perfectly well that raising questions does not necessarily mean that answers will follow – and in fact, most of the times they don’t. In Gitai’s reconstruction, Yitzhak Rabin – who in the film is portrayed as a man of peace whose death has led to an irreparable state of unrest – seems to be the target of several political organisations and religious groups that protest against him, encircle him and finally overwhelm him, thus creating the condition for his murder to happen.

The discontent against him derived mainly from his active role in defining and signing the Oslo Accords, which were received very harshly by the Israeli conservatives and also by Orthodox religious groups who thought that Rabin was acting against the rules of the Torah. A meeting of religious leaders is displayed in the film, where Rabin’s authority is overthrown and he is declared an unfaithful, untrustworthy personality.

Policemen and security guards who were operating near Kings of Israel Square where Rabin was assassinated are interrogated and their actions undergo severe scrutiny, but no one seems to want to take responsibility in what happened and they end up blaming each other. Gitai is very subtle and cruelly ironic in making it look like it was everybody’s fault, which ultimately means that nobody will take the fall. The situation is so absurd, and so clearly unsolvable, that one of the judges in the Shamgar Commission ends up saying, “I don’t know whether I should cry or laugh”.

Rabin’s assassin, Jew activist Yigal Amir (played by Yogev Yefet) is portrayed as a complex character, who acted of his own accord but also was the ideological pawn of a system that had been conspiring against Rabin for a very long time. The claustrophobic setting of the re-enactment of the investigation conveys the stifling sense of siege that Rabin must have felt during the days leading up to his murder, when many of the institutions and people around him were tightening the noose on him.  The bleak colours of Eric Gautier’s cinematography leave no room for hope or justice.

The film builds up to a moving archive interview with Rabin’s widow Leah, who expresses her profound sadness: we have the feeling that it is the same kind of sadness that Gitai still feels, the sadness of having lost someone who could have really made a difference in the Israeli politics and in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.