Martin Himel wants to first stress that he and Simcha Jacobovici are friends.
In fact, when Jacobovici's controversial film The Lost Tomb of Jesus was released last March, Himel was invited to the premiere. That's when the trouble started.
"It was a point-of-view documentary," the Canadian-born filmmaker says in an interview from Tel Aviv, where he is based. "I felt the picture was quite limited."
So the maker of such documentaries as End of Days and Confrontation at Concordia, who himself has been accused in the past of taking a strong point of view, set about to take a more balanced look at the tomb around which Jacobovici based his film.
Among the arguments:
-- There were apparently two ossuaries in the tomb with "Jesus, son of Joseph" on them, not just one
-- Ossuaries were reused over generations making DNA tests relating remains virtualy useless