Aharon is a devoted father, who in order to avoid putting his son Uri into a supervised home, escapes with him on an adventure throughout Israel. Director Nir Bergman (Broken Wings) takes us on a touching father and son road-trip, examining family relations and separation.
Asia tells the story of a single mom, Asia, whose relationship with her daughter, Vika, is more of a sister relationship rather than mother-daughter. Asia’s expectations of honesty and openness begin to negatively impact her relationship with Vika, who strives for privacy and independence. When Vika’s health begins to decline, this only increases her desire for exploration, and Asia finds herself at a crossroads between her own parenting style and respecting her daughter’s point of view. It is a story of navigating relationships and motherhood.
From the breakthrough director of Zero Motivation comes Honeymood, a romantic comedy set over the course of one night in Jerusalem. A bride and groom arrive at a lavish hotel suite after their wedding. What should have been a romantic night together turns into a fight that develops into a dazed urban journey, making them confront past loves, repressed doubts, and the lives they have left behind.
Renowned filmmaker Avi Nesher’s latest film The Other Story tells a suspenseful, poignant, and humorous story through the eyes of two rebellious young women from two troubled families that tangle in the most unexpected ways in Jerusalem. As the characters’ warring personal convictions and intimate anxieties clash, the secular and religious world views they hold dear also come to embody the struggle for identity reflecting present-day Israel.
A father and his filmmaker son explore the previously untold Holocaust story of 1,000 Viennese Jews stranded on the frozen Danube River in 1941 awaiting rescue by Ruth Klieger, a senior agent of the newly created Mossad. Intriguing storytelling weaves together interviews with survivors, dramatic reenactments, and a father who must tell this story.
While filming his father revisiting his childhood city of Mumbai, India, Israeli director Erez Laufer finds himself caught in the worst terror attack in the history of the city. As the drama of the terrorist takeover of Chabad House in Mumbai unfolds, the Laufer family recounts how they found refuge there in the 1940s after fleeing the Nazis.
Past and present collide as the family history is echoed in a contemporary war, and a little-known story emerges of the Jewish refugees who found a safe haven in Mumbai during World War II. Rafting to Bombay is the story of how 5 year old Nahum and his mother escaped the Nazis in Poland, crossed Europe by train and sailed on a raft on the Tigris River until they reached the exotic and fascinating India of monkeys, elephants and Rajas. But Nahum’s childhood experience, which is remembered as an enchanting fantasy, was in reality, a chilling story of a last minute escape.
Grierson award-winning director Iris Zaki enters the heart of Tekoa, an Israeli settlement in the West-Bank,and sits down to talk to the locals. Though fearful at first of the left-wing invader, settlers from various backgrounds gradually open up to her. Their honest, surprising and sometimes funny conversations offer a fresh take on Israeli reality from both sides of the Green Line.
Everything is going great for the director: he inherited the benefits of a generation of New York Jews who turned their backs on their religious pasts and re-defined themselves in America. But when his ex-patriate Israeli hustler pal Shimon walks into the trendy Kabbalah Center in Beverly Hills one day and walks out newly-religious – with a one-way ticket to a yeshiva in Jerusalem in hand – the director’s world is turned upside down.
Following Shimon to Israel, he moves through different spiritual and religious communities investigating and wondering if everyone – not just Shimon and Madonna – has lost his mind.
When they move to Israel to explore their Jewish heritage and revive their failing marriage, fifty-something French emigres Alain and Gisele Gaash arrive in Tel Aviv to find their luggage lost, their apartment gone, and Alain’s new job taken.
Thirteen year old Aharon Ninio, the only child of parents who are unable to conceive again, is determined to win the honor of carrying the Torah scrolls on Simhat Torah. The belief that he who carries the Torah may ask God for anything on behalf of others can elevate Aharon’s status in the neighborhood and win his distant father’s approval and love. But after Aharon wins the honor, his achievement brings ancient tensions to the surface: his father Bezalel is sure that it’s a sign from God and now his wish to have another child will come true; whereas his mother Rosa, having endured six miscarriages, is unwilling to mourn another loss. Aharon is torn between his parents’ conflicting wishes, when in fact all he wants for himself is to be loved by Aliza, the most popular girl in the neighborhood. His tension becomes unbearable and on the night of the honorary round, the Torah slips from his hands and shatters on the ground. Aharon’s public disgrace is an unbearable insult to his father, who refuses to forgive Aharon despite pleas from Rosa and the Rabbi, and leaves home. Aharon begins fasting to atone for the dropping of the Torah, but upon his father’s abandonment, his fast grows longer and more dangerous, as he refuses to stop even at the price of endangering his life.
