Peter is a new immigrant from Moldova and Kim a new immigrant from Brazil. Both are half Christian, half Jewish. They attend the Naamat high school in Jaffa. The film depicts a year in their lives and uncovers social “ghettos” where racism is rampant; racism which is directed at them and which they impart on others. All this takes place on the backdrop of the school preparations for a trip to Poland. This is a rattling story between personal and national memory on the road to forming Israeli identity.Director, Photographer & Producer: Assaf Sagi Gafni.Israel 2012
China is the first country in the world to classify Internet addiction as a clinical disorder. Electronic Heroin features a Beijing treatment center where Chinese teenagers are being deprogrammed, and follows the story of three boys from the day they arrive at the center, to their three-month treatment period, and their long awaited return home. The film provides a microcosm of modern Chinese life and investigates one of the symptoms of the Internet age.
Two young people with disabilities become star reporters in this uplifitng documentary. Efrat Dotan is 27 years old and has Down syndrom. 20 year old Matanel Bitton has developmental disabilites. Efrat and Matanel spend their days at SHALVA-The Associatin for Mentally and Physically Challenged Children in Israel where they are taught life skills that enable them to reach their mazimim potential. They have interviewed many well known personalities but their dream is to interview President Barak Obama. We follow them on a journey as they pursue their drewm and allow us to peak into their unique world.
Two girls meet online. Samar, 12, has an Arab Israeli mother and a Palestinian father from the Occupied Territories. She lives in Lod, a mixed city marred by poverty and crime. Linor, 11, was born in Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip but now lives in Tlamim, a religious settlement in the Lachish region. Only 67 km separate Lod and Tlamim, but the girls are also separated by a vast national, cultural and ideological abyss. As participants in a program combining education and technology, their relationship starts from online correspondence. Meeting face-to-face adds an exciting, tense and often surprising component to the two girls’ lives, sweeping them and their families into a profound and complex experience.
By the age of thirty he’d already become the most famous poet in the Jewish world. He spent very few years living in Tel Aviv, but he loved the city dearly. Some 100,000 people attended his funeral in 1934. “King of the Jews” is a portrait of the most beloved Jew of his day, Chaim Nachman Bialik. Combining special animation, a voice track by Chaim Topol, rare archival footage, long-forgotten photographs, poems by Bialik performed by Ninet and interviews with the foremost Bialik researchers and fans in Israel and around the world, this film retells the story of the little boy from the shtetl, who became King of the Jews.
Kaveret is Israel’s all-time classic rock band and is often known to Americans as Poogy, named for the drummer, Meir Fenigstien. Meir is better known to Americans as the founder and director of the Israel Film Festival. Meir’s story explores how he went from drummer to film festival producer and how he achieves his artistic and personal dreams when he finds out he fathered a daughter who is now 18.
Dana is the mother of an autistic child. While searching for help for her daughter, she discovers ACI, a captivating group of autistic activists, trying to bring about a change in public awareness and get people to understand that autism isn’t a disability. It is an identity. Dana joins them on a journey that will change everything she thought she knew about autism and about herself.
Aready on their second date, Amira took Michael to meet her therapist, so that the therapist could explain to him about her mental state. Michael wasn’t alarmed. They now have four children together, even if they live on the edge. Michael knows all the fastest routes to the emergency room and the psychiatric ward. Amira decided to stop hiding her mental illness (Borderline Personality Disorder) and to open up about her condition to her community. As a religious woman, she discovers that the restrictions of Jewish law make things especially difficult, but this only goads her to study the issues so that she can bring about a change in attitude among rabbis and the religious authorities toward people struggling with mental illness. This film tracks Amira’s dramatic struggle to stay alive, raise her children and examine what it means to be normal.
The day after my father died, the following announcement appeared in the press: “Author Yaakov Shabtai died of a heart attack at his home in Tel Aviv. He is survived by his wife and two daughters, both students”. I was just eight months old at the time, but the news item didn’t recognize my existence. Whoever wrote it probably preferred not to mention that the late author had another daughter, born to a woman with whom he was romantically involved while married. Years later, I set out in search of my father, following the milestones that marked his life and the words he wrote. I wanted to put together a portrait of him and understand his relationship with my mother. And I wanted to understand my own identity, as his daughter born out of wedlock. A film about love, memory and the dim boundary between life and art.
Ohad is an animal-rights activist. After years of being cut off from his family, he tries to heal the wounds and go home, but their decision to eat meat still stands in his way. Will the family manage to reconnect?
