Jerusalem International Film Festival 2010

The 27th Jerusalem International Film Festival will take place from July 8 – 17, 2010. Israeli film has always been at the heart of the festival; many of the significant Israeli films of the past decades had their premieres at the festival. As the Israeli film industry evolves and develops, the practice of documentary filmmaking has flourished. This year’s festival presents an impressive array of documentaries, each focusing on a particular story, with attention to the small details of individual lives. Together, they convey the complex social, political and human texture of life in Israel.

The Israeli documentaries that will compete in the festival are:

Hamoreh Lemishak (The Acting Teacher) – Director: Shlomo Hayoun, Producers: Renen Schorr and Shlomo Hayoun, Blues Productions and Hannah B. Productions.
Nissan Nativ, died in April 2008, 3 weeks before he was to receive the Israel Prize for Theatre. With no immediate family, he bequethed cherished items from his art collection to 21 people who were close to him. Through these people the film tracks the contradictory personality of one of the central founders of modern Israeli theatre. A cultural hero, who wanted to be an actor and teacher and was rejected by the establishment, developed an alternative world view for which he fought and paid a price.

443 – Director: Erez Miller, Producer: Osnat Trabelsi – Trabelsi Productions.
Road 443, travelling from the Mediterranean Sea to Jerusalem, through historic Beit Horon, has always been a major route of military and spiritual importance. Ever since Biblical times people have fought on this land, for the sake of God, history and the simple desire for a home. A fragmented road trip of encounters with people and places, minor yet poetic moments, that will not influence the course of history, yet feel the impact of history. A journey into a micro-cosmos that is mystical, pastoral, yet also violent, aggressive and chaotic.

Zeramim Ketuim (Broken Flow) – Directors: Guy Davidi and Alexander Guchman. Producers: Guy Davidi and Alexander Guchman with AMC.
Life trajectories meet in one village on the West Bank. Along the lines of the broken water pipe the village people move towards an uncertain future. Israel, in control of the water sources, supplies some water for drinking purposes and when the water supply is uncertain, nothing can develop. The control over the pressure in the pipes is not just control over a way of life, but also control of consciousness. There were days when Bil’in (the name means: without water) was the first village in the area to connect to a water source. This was an opportunity for progress and development, but in the eyes of some villagers the water from the pipes was bitter. The water was used as a tool to influence the people to cooperate with the Israeli Shabak and military. This caused an ideological rift, dividing the village into two camps. Returning to ancient methods of digging wells to collect rain water was an expression of renewed sense of independence among the people of the village but there is doubt whether the relationships between them can ever heal.

Hayim Yekarim (Precious Life) – Director: Shlomi Eldar. Producers: Ehud Bleiberg and Yoav Zeevi, Bleiberg Entertainment and Yasmin T.V. Two years ago a young Palestinian woman from Gaza arrived at the Children’s Hospital at Tel HaShomer with her 4 month old baby Muhammed, who was dying of a genetic disease – a lack of an immune system, a bubble baby. (His two sisters had died of the same disease after all efforts to save them had been made at the hospitals in Gaza and Egypt) in order to save Muhammed’s life he had to have a bone marrow transplant but there was no one to fund the cost of the transplant, which was estimated to be at least $55,000. The day before Muhammed was scheduled to be sent home to Gaza to die and be buried next to his two sisters, a doctor at the hospital, Dr. Raz Somekh, decided to fight for the child’s life and obtain the necessary funding. As a last resort, he turned to the journalist Shlomi Eldar who reports on Arab issues on Channel 10 and suggested that he may be interested in writing about the Palestinian baby, in the hopes that the news broadcast would touch the hearts of viewers and recruit Israelis to donate to save the dying baby. On seeing the broadcast, a father whose son was killed during his military service decided to donate the full sum, and made only one request: to remain anonymous. The film follows the two year fight to save Muhammed’s life, in parallel to the conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, with the Cast Lead Operation as its peak, when the family returned to Gaza. These two different yet parallel wars highlight the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the course of the fight to save the baby’s life there was a charged triangle of relationships between Raida, the film’s protagonist, Dr. Raz Somekh, the doctor who treated and saved the baby, and Shlomi Eldar, the film’s director, who reports daily on the war in Gaza and documents the fight for Muhammed’s life with his camera, as he becomes part of this struggle to save the dying baby. But the encounter with a different reality confronts the film’s protagonist with a dilemma when she realizes that the attempt to save her child’s life leads to a trap and she must make a cruel decision. Her surprising choice places her in conflict with the film’s director Shlomi Eldar.

Yermiyahu – Director and Producer: Eran Paz.
The Shapira neighborhood in Tel Aviv is a different place. A place where everyone is accepted – Sudanese refuges, drug addicts who drifted away from their North Tel Aviv affluent families, alcoholics, prostitutes, poor students and families with children. The architecture bears witness that it is a patchwork neighborhood. There are no clear borders between houses and yards, people sit in the street and the small gardens between crosswalks to get their hair cut, sort rice or just pass the time. Yermiyahu is a sort of philosopher, he thinks a lot. What little he possesses, he gives away freely. He wanders about like a king and cares for his “subjects” so that they will believe all is well. He walks through the neighborhood to prove that although capitalism has convinced these people that they are miserable – they are actually happy. Observing his life and the life of the neighborhood, one discovers a philosophy of life that is so different, and yet so familiar and close.

Hamekomon (The local newspaper) – Directors: Avishag Leibovitch and Matan Peled. Producer: Asaf Amir – Norma Productions.
“Ma Nishma?” (Hebrew: How Are You?) is the largest local newspaper of Kiryat Gat. It was founded in 1978 by Yaakov and Tamar Azuri. Yaakov died the following year and Tamar remained a widow with two children and a newspaper that was just getting started. She decided to run the newspaper herself and despite her personal hardship, financial difficulties and competition from other newspapers, “Ma Nishma?” has become an institution in Kiryat Gat. She fought for the paper’s survival for years. Employees cheated her, she became entangled in the gray market and had to sell her home. Her two children, Oved and Adi, returned to Kiryat Gat to join their mother and save the family business. The film is composed of the personal story of the newspaper: a mother, for whom the paper is her life’s work, and her two children, who are fighting to keep the paper running. The relationships between the three are replete with tension, jealousy and power struggles. A story of love and hate for a newspaper that took so much away from them and yet they cling to it and will not give up the fight, for the paper is the source of their power, the place where they talk, fight, laugh and work for a joint cause: every week, on Thursday morning, sending a new issue of “Ma Nishma?” to print.

Skate of Mind – Director: Karin Kaynar, Producer: Erez Heymann – Antenna Productions.
A glance at the city: Modern, historic, gray – we see it from above. But there is an entire subculture that lives on the cement margins and looks at the city from below – skaters. From their perspective there is no religion, city or state. They don’t know the names of streets, only stairs. The cement children don’t commit to anything much or take responsibility. They don’t serve in the military, they live as a community of outsiders and despite coming from different backgrounds they have their own language and a sense of mutual responsibility. The film reveals Israeli skateboard culture, marginal, urban and male, creating impossible connections between different religions, cultures and people. It is also a love story between Muhammed Kahil, one of the Israeli skate champions, an Israeli Arab from Jaffa, and Alina Feinburn from Tel Aviv, their struggle to live and love during times of war and despite the opposition of their parents.

Rehokim (Distant) – Directors: Ruty Shatz and Adi Barash, Producers: Adi Barash, Ruty Shatz and Ross Kaufman, Fig Films and Red Light Films.
Over the course of two years the directors followed a family of Palestinians living in poverty in the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood of Tel Aviv. Ibrahim, the father, a former collaborator who is no longer relevant to the Israeli government, must struggle to keep his family together, while struggle to have his contribution to security recognized by the government. His three teenage sons are constantly in and out of criminal institutions. The film exposes a bleak picture of oppression and discrimination, an alienated existence and daily struggle with the authorities and police. Questioning the issue of identity and the heavy price children pay for the choices made by their parents.

77 Stairs – Director and Producer: Avitisaam Maraana, Avitisaam Films.
Two years have passed since the roof party that Yonatan organized for his neighbor Avitisaam. Avitisaam is a Palestinian Israeli. Yonatan, her neighbor is a Zionist Israeli who immigrated to Israeli from Canada on his own, enlisted in the IDF and dreamt of a Jewish home. Avitisaam is a filmmaker who comes from a Muslim family in Northern Israel. She came to Tel Aviv alone to find a home, career, and perhaps love. The two lived in the same neighborhood in South Tel Aviv for two years while chaos reigned in Israel. There was a war in Gaza, the extreme Right won in the elections and the Left was dying. Hatred and racism against the Arab Israelis and a great rift between the two peoples, and yet the couple remained together. Then Yonatan’s 85 year old grandfather came to Israel for a short visit from Canada. The grandfather, grandson and director decide to visit Kibbutz Ein Dor, which the grandfather helped found in 1948. On this short trip, each of the three undertakes a private journey, a mixture of nostalgia and loss, longing and pride, love and hate, independence and Nakba. By the end of the film – nothing will remain the same.

Shtikat HaArchion (The Silence of the Archive) – Director: Yael Hersonski, Producer: Naomi Schori and Eytan Kan Tor.
Most documentary films that deal with the horrors of World War II, present the archival films and photographs that survived the war as illustrations of the stories of witnesses or documents presented in the film. Few have focused their attention on the perspective from which these photographs were taken, usually by Nazi photographers, the circumstances under which they were taken, and the complex message they convey.

The lectors for the documentary films, headed by Gilli Mendel, were: Anat Even, Nitza Gonen, Erez Dvora, Ruti Lev Ari, Ron Ofer, Mart Perhomovsky, Danny Rosenberg, Anat Shperling.

* Midnight East will be providing ongoing information on the Jerusalem International Film Festival. Hebrew film titles have been given a literal translation in parentheses, official English titles will be provided as available.

AYELET DEKEL