Summer 2011, 25-year-old Daphni Leef moves into a tent in the centre of Tel Aviv to protest the cost of housing and within a few days she becomes a leader and a face for the largest protest movement in the history of Israel. The film depicts the challenges a person at the forefront of a struggle must face and what happens to our soul when we become an image.
During 50 years of writing Ephraim Kishon sold millions of books and won two Golden Globes, yet he could never write his own biography. At the age of 70 he invited journalist Yaron London to assist him. “KISHON” uses animation to ‘bring back to life’ Kishon’s persona and reenact the rare dialog.
82-year-old Elisheva Rise passed away. As her children clear out her home, they find journals she secretly wrote to each of them documenting their lives from their birth until her last day. Every evening she would sit in her kibbutz home and write to her 7 children, whom she had never hugged or kissed. Following the treasure she left behind, they embark on an emotional and painful journey, learning about childhood, motherhood, and parenting.
Haim Hatuel started piercing his kids at age 5. Today, Delila and Maor are Israeli fencing champions. Haim was born Morocco and came to Israel when he was 15. A day after his release from the army, he saw an ad that changed his life. He was accepted into a fencing academy, which was a social sport initiative aimed at turning street kids into law abiding citizens. Over the next 45 years, Haim has built a fencing empire in Acre. His protégés participated in seven Olympics – from Munich in 1972 to Beijing in 2008. Just before the 2016 Rio Olympics, the mayor wants to close down the fencing club. The Arab fencers have abandoned the field, and for the first time, Haim’s own children are rebelling against the dictatorial rule that turned them into fencers from the day they were born. Will Haim succeed to save his life-long work?
Halit is very overweight. Still, she is a happy woman who has achieved professional success, has good friends and a loving life partner. At the age of 40 she begins to fear the future. The film follows the process of change Halit is going through and enables us to see her confronting her open wounds with courage in front of the camera. In a world where everyone wants to be thin, what will be Halit’s choice? Her journey will change her world.
For the past seven years Muhi, a brave and spirited boy from Gaza has been living in an Israeli hospital, the only home he has ever known. Caught between two homes and two peoples, Muhi is unable to return to Gaza. He is saved and raised by those considered enemy by his people, in paradoxical circumstances that transcend identity, religion and the conflict that divides his world. His time at the hospital is running out and Muhi now faces the most critical choices of his life.
In recent years, anti-Semitism in France is on the rise. Tension is felt on the streets of Paris, but the real battlefield is online, were hatred has no limits or censorship. This reality gives birth to a new kind of vigilante: A militant-Zionist hacker by the name of “Ulcan”, who declares a one-man-war against the leaders of the anti-Semitic movement. The Patriot is dark tale of extremism and vengeance in the cyber age.
Documentary filmmaker Ran Tal draws on footage culled from over eighty amateur films shot between 1930 and 1970 to explore the curious story of the Israeli kibbutz movement. Conceived as a utopian refuge, kibbutzim were collective communities in which children were raised to become the new face of the Jewish people. In the kibbutz, children were offered only limited contact with their parents, completely oblivious to the bold experiment in which they were the primary test subjects. They were cared for by nannies and slept together in a separate cottage designed specifically for them. As a result, the children became their own family, a new breed that placed little value on material possessions while immersing themselves in physical labor and strict ideology. Director Tal was one of those children, and in this film he offers a vivid portrait of that epoch by allowing other former kibbutz members to comment on the archival footage while reflecting on their unconventional childhoods.
Sheherazade’s Tears presents the struggle diary of choreographer Irina Jammal, a Ukrainian married to an Israeli Arab. Irina teaches ballet dancing in an Arab village. She travels with her students, an Arab boy and a Jewish girl, who perform a piece from “Sheherazade” at the the Kiev youth ballet festival. They demonstrate her belief that where people can dance together they also can live together.
