It is the height of summer and the reality show “His Heart’s Choice” is just about to launch its third season. Zacky Reibenbach, the show’s creator, knows that without a really good gimmick, there is no way he will repeat the success of the previous two seasons. Then he remembers his film student, Yehuda Konitz. Yehuda has been documenting the rehabilitation of his friend Eitan for the past three years after the latter went blind under strange circumstances during his military service. His unique rehabilitation process was developed by Yael, Eitan’s personal trainer and Yehuda’s girlfriend. Yael is Eitan’s eyes, and with her he is a true phenomenon–exactly what Reibenbach is looking for. Yet when Yehuda accepts Reibenbach’s offer of fifty grand to help his movie, in exchange for putting “the phenomenon and the trainer” on the show, he finds himself drawn into Reibenbach’s deceptions, as well as the shady, glitzy world of reality television, and on a downward spiral towards a dead end.
Slava and his friends, a group of young Russian immigrants, are out of place, frustrated and alone in the harsh setting of a small desert town in Southern Israel. Victor, an older immigrant who used to be a soccer coach, suggests they set up a soccer team to compete in the local tournament. The soccer field becomes their home away from home, the place where they can be themselves, and where they can prove their worth: to themselves, to each other, and most importantly, to the new world in which they find themselves.
Alex is a thirteen-year-old boy who is about to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah. Alex has typical Polish parents who work hard to make ends meet. On account of their difficult economic situation, they are compelled to share their apartment with a Persian tenant named Faruk that tries to fight his baldness by means of different creams. But when Alex falls in love with the new girl in his class, Mimi, his aunt Lola arrives in Israel from Poland to search for lost love. Alex falls for his aunt and she on her part gives him more than just maternal love. This film is notable for its careful reconstruction of the ’50s, known as the Austerity period in Israel.
Menachem is a Yeshivah student and newly made commander of his own IDF unit. His dynamic right-wing spiritual leader, Rabbi Meltzer, whose West Bank Yeshivah Menachem attends, is the father of his love Michal. Although Menachem is a beloved student and commander, the rabbi has not chosen him to be the suitor for his daughter. Instead, the bone will be thrown to Pini, a brilliant Yeshivah student. But the rabbi’s daughter won’t allow herself to be some prize. And when she scorns Pini, Pini begins hatching his his own secret plot. Complicating matters are the Shin Bet’s caustic distrust of non-secular Israelis… and a nationalist plot that is brewing to blow up the Temple Mount.
See more about Time of Favor at the Israel Film Center
A notorious Casanova, Zidane happily leads a life unlike that of his two friends Omer and Uri who endure the agony of commitment—until a beautiful Colombian woman from Zidane’s past pulls him into the romantic fray. Now, as the three men attempt to decipher the mysteries of women, they’re forever reminded that love frequently offers up equal doses of happiness and misery in this lighthearted Israeli comedy.
Bruriah and her husband Rabbi Meir lived in the second century A.D., a time when the Rabbis declared “women are light-minded.” Bruriah, a most learned and intelligent woman, mocked their statement. In order to prove their justification, Rabbi Meir sent one of his students to seduce her. Bruriah was seduced and when she discovered that it had been planned by her husband, she died by suicide.
In the present day, a woman who also bears the name Bruriah deals with childhood trauma: a life of boycott and excommunication that was imposed on her following a book written by her father about the same act. Bruriah embarks on a journey to find the one copy of the book that may have survived. Her husband opposes the search because Bruriah’s desire to locate the book poses a threat to the lifestyle he has built for his family.
Arik, a teenage boy growing up in Haifa in 1968, gets a job working for Yankele Bride, a matchmaker. Yankele, a mysterious Holocaust survivor, has an office in back of a movie theater that shows only love stories, run by a family of Romanian little people in the seedy area by the port. Yankele introduces Arik to a new world, built on the ruins of an old one. As Arik begins to learn the mysteries of the human heart through his work with Yankele, he falls in love with Tamara, his friend Beni’s cousin. Tamara has just returned from America and is full of talk of women’s rights, free love, and rock and roll. The disparate parts of Arik’s life collide in unexpected, often funny and very moving ways as he lives through a summer that changes him forever. Avi Nesher’s mixes comedy with drama as it tells a coming-of-age story unlike any you’ve ever seen before.
