Every year Nek-Nek, a remote Alaskian village, is visited by some 5,000 fisherman from every part of the U.S.A, who spend three weeks, trying to hook hundreds of millions of red salmon. This battlefield is the backdrop for the director’s personal account of his seven years as a fisherman in Alaska.
The 1982 peace agreement with Egypt obliged thousands of people to leave their homes in the Sinai desert. From the options they were given by the Israeli government, many chose “Gush Katif” in the Gaza Strip as their new home. To progress the peace process, the Israeli government ordered the evacuation of the Gaza Strip on August 2005. This decision created political and social turmoil. The evacuation was to be the most complex and sensitive mission ever to be undertaken by the police forces. This movie is about emotions, beliefs, conscience and true brotherly love. It is a story of humanity in its finest hour.
Film Fanatic documents the struggle of Yehuda Grovais, an Israel ultra-Orthodox Jew who acts contrary to his faith to create feature films. Moreover, his films are geared towards his own community, the ultra-Orthodox, who aren’t supposed to watch movies just as he isn’t permitted to create them. The ultra-Orthodox community can only provide amateur actors, funding is terribly limited, filming must pause for all daily prayers, and women cannot appear in any scene.
Herzl envisaged an old-new state, and planned every last detail. Among other things, he spoke of what a religious leadership should do, how Jews and Arabs should get along, and voiced opinions on the status of Jerusalem.
Oren Harman and Yanay Ofran embark upon a personal journey to the heart of contemporary “Israeliness”. They discuss what has happened to the old boundaries of identity that once divided Israeli society and defined the power relations within. In doing so, the presenters chart religious, national, personal and cultural identities in Israel today.
Danny Chanoch (74), survivor of several concentration camps, convinces his reluctant children to retrace his steps through the holocaust, eventually spending a night in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Adel, a refugee working in the Sinai, and Eshel, an Israeli kibbutznik woman, fall in love. They have two girls and try to figure out how best to live as a family.
A Hebrew Lesson is a humorous, smart and exciting mosaic of a mixture of immigrants of various nationalities and their teacher. It is a film that gets under the skin of its participants as well as that of the audience. One of those whose characters won’t let you go even days after having seen it – and actually you don’t want them to leave. Chin left her daughter in China and came to Israel to make a living there. She cleaned Ehud’s house, and they fell in love. Sasha never considered immigrating to Israel. But four years after his wife left Russia with their daughter, he understood that life without his child would be worthless. He abandoned a thriving business, only to find himself in Tel Aviv’s worst neighborhood. Marisol grew up as a Jewish princess in Lima, Peru and came to Israel to learn something about life. An unplanned pregnancy alters her plans. These and other characters meet in a Hebrew language Ulpan, where their personal stories melt with the complexities of Israeli reality. The immense effort of learning a new language is revealed through their encounter with a strange culture and an unfamiliar environment. Israeli society is revealed through the foreigner’s eyes. This gaze – at times funny, at times sad – paints daily reality with irony. But beyond the obvious differences, the human common denominator of longing and love triumphs time and again.
