Ten years in the lives of two opposing communities. The evicted community of the Elei Sinai settlement and the members of kibbutz Palmachim, who went on a long and unclear journey in order to create one joined community. A journey only possible in the Israeli reality.
On June 22nd 1941, the Romanian Army attacked the Soviet Union alongside the German Army. The objective was to regain lands that had been taken by the Soviets. By the end of August 1941, the Romanian Government received from the Germans lands on the Eastern side of the Dniester River, Nistru in Romanian.
The film Beyond the Nistru depicts some of the Holocaust events that took place during the first year of the greatest patriotic war in Romanian occupied Soviet Union territories. The film enrolls the story of the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of Jews – victims of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Romanians. Beyond the Nistru tells the story of the suffering and death of Jews, victims of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Romanians.
Last March, while Amir Guttman Fryszer was in the midst of rehearsals for the High Five Band reunion, he felt unwell. After a month of medical examinations, he received the worst news of all: he had Lymphatic cancer and his chances of recovery were slim.
A week before Amir was scheduled for bone-marrow transplant he received a response from a pathology expert in the US saying they did not recognize cancer. His life was turned over again and Amir embarked on a new journey to discover the truth – did he indeed have cancer?
What happened to the worn sofa we discarded after our visit to Ikea? What became of the kitchen dishes we left by the dumpster? Cast-Offs depicts the journey of discarded items from the heart of consumerist Israel to the periphery and the Palestinian Authority, where they come back to life.
The film exposes an underworld that exists alongside our consumer reality – a transparent existence of transparent people whose livelihood depends on the objects we discard offhand, without even giving a thought to their fate.
The director follows Shalev from age 10 to 15. Shalev’s parents immigrated to Israel from Caucasus. He is torn between his need to remain a child and his father pushing him into manhood.
Shalev’s father, fights for his son to have a better future than his and teaches him values in unorthodox yet creative ways. The mother, who left her husband is now requesting to regain contact with her children. Although Shalev prefers living with his father, he moves to his mom and his relationship with his father becomes distant until he disappears completely.
This is Arthur Abramov’s first feature-length film.
#uploading_holocaust is the first documentary based entirely on existing YouTube materials.
Every year, a quarter of all Israeli high school students embark on a school trip to Poland to commemorate the Holocaust. This trip is known in Israel as “The Journey to Poland”.
Since it began in the late 1980’s, the traditional journey includes 100 teenagers, 4 concentration camps, 3 mass graves, 2 ghettos and 14 memorial services within 8 days, but the fact that many of the students upload videos of their journey to YouTube, is a newer phenomenon.
As the last Holocaust survivors are nearing the end of their lives, young Israelis are eager to immortalize the collective trauma. Video sharing becomes a central tool in the commemoration efforts. Teenagers, teachers and parents film every testimony, gas chamber and ceremony, as well as late-night hang-outs at the hotel and video selfies.
They edit their version of history and share the clips online, adding to an ever-expanding YouTube archive of more than 20,000 clips.
#uploading_holocaust is a curation of these user-generated videos, offering a unique point of view of a new generation, while revealing a moving and troubling image of the way collective memory is formed in the web-age.
The story of the pork industry in Israel, an industry that has raised ethnic tensions and heated struggles over the country’s short history. Sitting firmly between Israel’s most essential identity issues and the fundamental right to freedom of choice, how did the unsuspecting pig turn into such a central taboo in the Jewish tradition and one of the secular state’s most prominent symbols? Praise the Lard is a film about the Zionist movement’s attempt to create a “new Jew” in the land of Israel, unbeholden to old traditions, and about this new identity’s struggle to survive in the face of fierce resistance from religious and observant Jews. Praise the Lard presents a sharp take on the outsized role one farm animal came to play in the Holy Land.
