Can an artist be too modest to become famous? Asher Feldman was an Israeli painter who led an anonymous life away from the crowd, and left behind an artistic treasure containing hundreds of paintings. Years later, his only daughter Lola, as vivid as an adolescent at her 80th birthday, faces a dramatic decision: Will she keep his works to herself, as her father did, or sell it and thereby share it with the rest of the world? A story about people who dare to give up fame and big money. A breathtaking encounter with a hidden piece of Israeli Legacy.

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Bombarded by ads, billboards, signs, posters and shop window splendors, we walk the streets unaware of an entire world displayed for all and yet unseen. Graffiti, murals, installations and prints call upon passers-by to open their eyes. For some artists any wall is a canvas and every day an exhibition.

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Nati Ornan, an unknown musician and failed lover, lives in a grey world. By day, he is a genuine loser who lives with his mother and plays the part of a vacuum cleaner in a children’s play. By night, he is the leader of a rebellious Indy band that is overlooked by the establishment and the public. His pitiful personal and professional life drives Nati to create a dark and narcissistic alter ego known as Gotel Botel. Gotel brings Nati the greatness he could not achieve on his own. Gotel is able to avenge his enemies, create a successful underground show and conquer the heart of Ayelet, Nati’s secret love. 

The post The Life and Death of Gotel Botel appeared first on Israel Film Center.

The Jews used many ways to struggle against the Nazi system. One way, perhaps the most heroic and least familiar, was the cultural struggle. Against the threat of impending death, the horrors of daily existence and in the most impossible conditions, a life full of rich, creative and spiritual culture was established.

The film is set in Ponar, the Vilna ghetto, during the years 1940 to 1943 and tells the amazing story of the song contest that was held in the ghetto in the year 1943, a few months before it was destroyed.

The film focuses on one particular song and its composer, an 11 year old boy named Alek Wolkovsky. The song is called Ponar in Hebrew, “Shtilar Shtilar” (quietly) in Yiddish. The words of the song, which tell of the gloom and doom that had befallen Vilna, were turned into a lullaby so that the Nazis would not be able to understand.

Sixty years later, the director, Racheli Schwartz, found the child – composer, Alexander Tamir, who had since become a professor of music and a renowned pianist. The film accompanies Alexander on his return, 60 years later, to his hometown.

The emotional and moving journey to the past exposes how culture and art overcame the destruction, and reaches a peak when Alex gets on to that very same stage, in the Jewish theater in the ghetto. He plays the song that won the competition, which has almost become an anthem.

A young Israeli singer, who is the same age as the singers who prepared for the competition in 1943 but were killed before they could actually compete, accompanies Alexander Tamir’s music.

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At the age of eight she was already dancing at Moscow’s Bolsoi theatre. Since then she has performed on the world’s most prestigious stages.

In the course of a career spanning over half a century, Deborah Bertonoff achieved world fame not only as a dancer with unique style and personal statement, but also as an author and researcher of dance.

For her life’s work she won the prestigious Israel Prize. Today, aged 86, in the small room where her only son committed suicide just a meter away from her and her late husband, she deals for the first time in fourteen years with the stacks of paper, photographs and other paraphernalia that clutter the room. Another life cycle that must reach closure before her last performance.

A summation? A farewell? Not at all. Just the desire not to be pathetic. Just not to fall.

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The movie is a personal journey to Serbia, due to the death of my Yugoslavian boyfriend who immigrated to Israel. The movie focuses on wartime absurdness of reality and in two disciplines-Cinematographic and theatre, in Yugoslavia and in Israel [1997-2002].

Absurd, surrealism and grotesque are streams of art, which developed after the world wars due to the frustration from life, which came about after those wars. In the cinema the movies of the genius directors Emmir Kusterica and Haim Busaglo are examples for surrealism under war. In theatre in Israel there is a trend of absurd plays, of which some are classics like those of Harold Pinter. In Yugoslavia many original plays which are absurd, satirical, cynical and with black humor are produced.

It seems that due to the ethnic mixture in Yugoslavia and Israel, there are influences of different cultures and religions on the musical discipline. The music of Goran Bregovich as he himself says is very frankensteinish because it is achieved by elements that are disharmonic. The paradoxical fact is that in the near past Yugoslavia was a communist and an atheist country, where there was no significance to religion, whereas nowadays all wars are caused by religion and nationalism. The question that must therefore be asked: is it not possible to be “Frankenstein” in the political reality as well as in the arts?

The post Dada do Jaja – Absurd Under War in Yugoslavia & Israel appeared first on Israel Film Center.

In an old neighborhood in the southern town Beer-sheva, “The Municipal Center for the Art of Dance – Bat-Dor Beer Sheva”, one of the best ballet schools in the country, has been active for over 20 years. Many girls who dream of becoming ballerinas start their dancing there at an early age. For them, ballet school is a place filled with hopes and frustrations. It is your whole world, until it shuts you out because you’re not good enough, because your body isn’t perfect. This film’s director, Michal Kesten-Keidar, was one of those girls. This was the place where her dream was formed, and the place where it was shattered.

Now she returns to her childhood dreams, to the pink tutu skirts, the tough drills and the harsh teachers.

The film follows Daniella Shapira, the school’s director, who made Bat-Dor into a kind of “European oasis” in the dusty and sweaty city, and documents the stories of two young girls who dance at the school, fighting to keep dancing in the big world. This is the story of young girls with big dreams, girls from Beer Sheva, who dream of breaking their way through to the Israeli opera house in Tel-Aviv, and from there to maybe conquer the big stages around the world. This is a story of the distance between childhood dreams and growing up, and having to face the reality surrounding us, the body in which we live.

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Director Erik Greenberg Anjou (A Cantor’s Tale, NYJFF 2006) returns with this high- energy documentary about the Grammy Award-winning, New York-based superstar klezmer band, The Klezmatics. Mesmerizing performances are mixed with soulful interview with band members as well as other performers including Joshua Nelson, Chava Alberstein, and David Krakauer. Anjou and crew followed the Klezmatics for over three years capturing the band’s highs, lows, and relentless march forward.

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The documentary Song of Life follows the one hundred singers of the “Israeli Philharmonic Singers Choir ” on their tour to Poland, performing at the Ceremony commemorating 60 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

At the rehearsals in Tel-Aviv the choir sings Verdi’s famous Requiem. The singers are not aware that the 76 years old lady, Greta Klinsberg, who has just recently joined the choir, sang this requiem 62 years earlier when she was a child in Terezenstadt, before being sent to the Auschwitz with her sister who was murdered there. Her story is revealed to the choir and the audience step by step as the film progresses. Greta was among the few who survived and since then she has never stopped singing.

In the course of the film we learn about some of the individual singers of the choir, and their personal connections to the Holocaust.

The documentary features songs sung by the choir and also shows some rare black & white footage of the last Opera sung by Greta as a child. This footage was taken by the Nazis in Terezenstadt before the children were sent to Auschwitz.

In general the film is about music and the power it gives to people.

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