America’s favorite sport is spreading to Israel and bringing together a diverse cast of characters. Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians as well as Americans living in Israel, and religious settlers all playing together, shows how sports can be a unifier in a complex, multifaceted society.
The story of an Israeli pediatric cardiologist sent to Africa to perform lifesaving operations in Tanzania, where every day five children die from heart conditions. Dr. Akiva Tamir and his team examine hundreds of children, of which only a handful can receive the treatment which will save their lives. When 6 year-old Julius arrives to the clinic in critical condition, Dr. Tamir is forced to choose whether to operate on the child, who has very little chances of surviving. Dr. Tamir and his team take the viewers on an emotional rollercoaster as they deal with the most serious question of who to treat and who will be left to die. The experienced physicians find it hard to detach from the emotional bond they share with their small patients. “A Heartbeat Away” is a riveting human drama, swinging on the pendulum between science and faith, hope and despair, life and death. In its center, human doctors who have been thrust to the position of Gods in the midst of Africa.
The film portrays the story of Safaa Dabour, a religious Muslim from Nazareth, struggling to fulfill her dream of personal independence and to establish a cinematheque in Nazareth, the first of its kind for the Arab population in Israel. Safaa’s father and husband both died while she was still a young mother of two boys and she chose to take charge of her own fate and establish the cinematheque.
Yahud 1994. A minor construction dispute on Passover Eve turns into a nation-wide drama. Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, a charismatic Yemenite leader, barricades himself in his house with his armed followers, demanding a commission of inquiry for the disappearance of thousands of Yemenite children during the first years of the State of Israel. In the frenzy, the Yemenite children’s affair dominates the public agenda, revealing wounds that have never healed.
A new and previously unseen viewpoint on Yitzhak Rabin – his own. Beginning with his childhood in Tel-Aviv, we follow him through his teen years at the Kaddouri Agricultural High School, his early days in the Palmach, his military career in the IDF as commanding officer and later Chief-of-Staff, and his political career as a diplomat, Prime Minister, opposition leader, Minister of Defense, and Prime Minister once more.
“My last project, Highway 90, awakened in me the desire to not simply breeze by peripheral cities but to settle in one for a prolonged period of time. I decided to take a break from filming, rent a house in Arad for a month and record the process… I was looking for the routine of everyday life – morning coffee in the neighborhood cafe, a visit to the grocery store, getting to know the life and the people.”
The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece to the Oscar®-nominated The Act Of Killing. Through Oppenheimer’s footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.
Two musicians from Tel Aviv travel to Jamaica to record an album with forgotten reggae artists from the past. The film follows Ariel Tagar (Kalbata) and Uri Wertheim (Mixmonster), from their basement studio in Tel Aviv, all the way to the Kingston ghettos, looking for their favourite singers of days gone by. In Jamaica, they encounter a strange, often challenging culture while trying to achieve their goal. A unique musical journey into the forgotten corners of reggae of the seventies and eighties, and a rare glimpse into the smoky, dusty world of Rub-a-Dub and its past champions.
