Israeli documentary films
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- DirectorDoron TsabariRino ZrorSoccer mania hits Beit She'an, a small working-class Israeli town near the Jordanian border, when the local team prepares for their last crucial game of the season, against the rich, national champions from Haifa, exacerbating conflicts between rich and poor, small town and big city, and minorities and the ruling class.
- DirectorNoa MaimanOrna Ben-Dor NivHomecoming is a journey of immigration, identity and national belonging. Na-to, Auto and German are three young Israeli born children whose parents are immigrant workers from three different continents. Our intention was to see through their eyes the possible outcome of being forced to return to their parent's homeland. Our three protagonists were lucky to be legalized in 2006, but approximately another 800 children and youth just like them are still facing possible deportation. When we started the film, we assumed Homecoming refers to their return to their parent's homeland. During the work, we realized that homecoming meant only one thing for the three of them: the return home to Israel.
- DirectorGavriel BibliowiczStarsModi Bar-OnAaron GevaDudu GevaThe story of the Israeli artist and comic-maker Dudu Geva.
- DirectorRan TalAn intimate portrait of the children who were part of Israel's first kibbutzim.
- DirectorDror MorehStarsAmi AyalonAvraham ShalomAvi DichterA documentary featuring interviews with all surviving former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency whose activities and membership are closely held state secrets.
- DirectorMor LoushyStarsAmos OzCENSORED VOICES combines raw original recordings of Israeli soldiers recounting their fears and doubts following Israel's 1967 Six-Day War, using archival newsreel footage as a stark reminder of how far the region remains from peace.
- DirectorGavriel BibliowiczAnat ZeltzerStarsModi Bar-OnRona KenanThe film is looking for the parallel between the events of Tel Hai incident (1921) to the Second Lebanon War (2006) event near the cemetery of Kfar Giladi.
- DirectorYoav ShamirDocumentary filmmaker Yoav Shamir's depiction of the checkpoints that the Israel Defense Forces man in the Palestinian Authority.
- DirectorNitzan OfirTwo girls meet through digital educational project. Samar's father comes from the (Palestinian) Occupied Territories. Linor's family was evacuated from a Jewish settlement. Only 67 kilometers apart, yet an ideological gulf stands between them. The girls meet and an instant bond is struck. Nevertheless, reality overpowers the friendship.
- DirectorYair QedarStarsYona WallachA cinematic journey into the world of Yona Wallach, an Israeli poet, whose radical life and poetry ended with her death at an early age, leaving behind a myth and a trail of admirers. More than 25 years after her death, seven recorded tapes from her last interview, which were made with Helit Yeshurun, are discovered. In these tapes, Wallach confesses to her attraction to madness, her experiments with drugs, her relationship with god and about the dangers of writing. The film weaves her testimony with interviews, with rare archival footage, with her poems and with animation that revives Wallach's thoughts, images and visions.
- DirectorEyal Sagui BizaweSara TsifroniStarsAmr AbdulgalilMohamed Sherif HassanYusof MutaharThe Arab Movie brings to many Israelis the stars and the songs, the convoluted plots, and that fleeting moment when they shared the same cultural heroes as everyone else in the Middle East.
- DirectorErez LauferStarsYitzhak Rabin20 years after his assassination, Yitzhak Rabin himself tells his dramatic life story.
- DirectorRuth WalkA moving portrait of Israel Becker, a founder of the first professional Yiddish theatrical company in post-war Germany and writer and star of the 1946 autobiographic feature film Long is the Road (restored by NCJF), the first feature to portray the Holocaust from a Jewish point of view.
- DirectorDavid PerlovStarsDavid PerlovMira PerlovYael PerlovShot over a ten-year period, Diary is not only the political, professional, and personal diary of a man, but is a testimony on the turbulent reality of a war-torn country, Israel. In six chapters, Perlov travels to Tel Aviv, Paris, London, and finally to Brazil, where he was born. The film is also a family diary in which Perlov records the coming of age of his two daughters, Yael and Naomi.
- DirectorTomer HeymannJuliano Mer-KhamisRan TalA film project created by Jewish and Arab teenagers from Israel's outskirts, in collaboration with directors Juliano Mer-Khamis ('Arna's Children'), Ran Tal ('Children of The Sun') and Tomer Heymann ('Paper Dolls', 'I Shot My Love', 'The Queen Has No Crown'). The teenage directors from Israel's 'twilight zones', whose voice is rarely heard, got cameras and the guidance they needed in order to film their communities, their families and themselves.
- DirectorBarak HeymannTomer HeymannFor the first time in Israel, a group of Arab and Jewish parents decide to establish a conjoint bi-national, bi-lingual school inside an Arab village. The film follows the school's first year and portrays through the personal stories of its characters, how complicated and fragile is the attempt to create an environment of co-existence against the backdrop of the complicated reality around.
- DirectorTomer HeymannStarsCabra CasayIdan ReichelAvi Wogderess-VasaTomer Heymann followed Israeli pop/world-beat band The Idan Raichel Project on their 2006 concert tour to Ethiopia and emerged with a documentary that rollicks and rocks. The film, part lighthearted road trip, part examination of multiculturalism in Israel, is a close-up ride with the young Israeli-Ethiopian-Yemenite band members, who muse on the loss of their heritage and on their excitement as tourists embracing roots in Africa. Black Over White deftly explores their cultural ambivalence and their experience of racism back home in Israel. One of the musicians is reunited with his grandmother in Addis, music is made with rural villagers and in urban clubs, and in one poignant sequence, future immigrants to Israel meet the musicians. The culminating concert-a fusion of Middle Eastern multiethnic grooves-is a success and emotional high point, but for the band members, the meaning of home remains elusive.
- DirectorTomer HeymannStarsTomer HeymannZvi HeymannAndreas MerkSeventy years after his grandfather escapes from Nazi Germany to Palestine, Israeli documentary director Tomer Heymann returns to the country of his ancestors to present his film "Paper Dolls" at the Berlin International Film Festival, and there meets a man who will change his life. This 48-hour love affair, originating in Berghain Panorama Bar, develops into a significant relationship between Tomer and Andreas Merk, a German dancer. When Andreas decides to move to Tel-Aviv, he not only has to cope with a new partner, but to manage the complex realities of life in Israel and his personal connection to it as a German citizen. Tomer's mother, descendant of German immigrants was born and lived all her life in a small Israeli village, where she raised five sons. One by one, she watches her children leave the country she and her family helped to build, and now cannot help but try to influence the life of Tomer, the one son who remains. I SHOT MY LOVE tells a personal but universal love story and follows the triangular relationship between Tomer, his German boyfriend, and his intensely Israeli mother.
- DirectorRoy SherStarsHaris AlexiouMehtap DemirRoza EskenazyRoza Eskenazi sang the way she lived, with passion, fire and love. This is the story of three young musicians who embark on an exciting musical journey, to tell the story of Greece's best-loved rebetiko singer.
- DirectorYair ElazarStarsDavid Elazar30 years after the death of Lieutenant General David Elazar (Dado), his son, Yair, takes a journey in his footsteps. His aim is to penetrate the web of myths shrouding his father's memory; He wants to stop living in his shadow, and to overcome his anger at him, for always putting the Army first. As the journey advances, Yair comes to understand that his father did not differentiate the private from the public; The military was his life: a course of meteoric ascent ending with a painful downfall. After spending many months with his father in the editing room, Yair grows to understand his choices, and is finally able to say goodbye.
- DirectorYoel SharonMovie about the Yom Kippur War's traumatic, final battle, for the town of Suez.
- DirectorYariv MozerIn the summer of 2006, at the age of 28, I was suddenly drafted as a reserves soldier in the Second Lebanese War. Instinctively, I grabbed my video camera and thread a shoelace, securing it around my neck right next to my rifle. I said to myself this camera will be a tool with which to mediate between myself and the reality into which I was thrown - the reality of war. I was part of an artillery Regiment. As days went by, I understood that this war is not as it was planned. Mixed orders, more and more dead soldiers; mess and disorder came to be the words describing this war. And as long as this war evolved, bringing more chaos and destruction, I continued to use my camera and shoot. I film the faces of soldiers, exhausted and overwhelmed. I heard the soldier's desire to tell their story - to talk about what they have seen. The feelings were of a pointlessness war and a strong and clear failure. Months after the war ends, I was compelled to find the individuals who served with me. Those I followed during the war. Those I met accidentally while wandering, and whose faces and souls were burnt into my mind. They are my principal obsession and characters of the film. I followed them in their daily life. They recall the images of this war and how they currently relate to them. My characters and I went to this war naïve with a definite purpose. We woke up, shaken, in shock, with doubts and regrets. Each one of us, those who survived, paid a price.
- DirectorAdir HaruviStarsAlon Ben DavidA documentary that takes the testimony of people who were on duty on the day Ron Arad Captured.
- DirectorDavid BergmanJacques EhrlichHaim GouriHistorical documentary made up of footage and stills shot by the Nazis. A compilation of testimony from witnesses who appeared at the Eichmann trial provides a telling narrative.
- DirectorHila CohenOshri HayunA special relationship between Aisha, age 96, and her she goat Buba, in the background of failed relationships with her 11 children. As years go by, her animals provide Aisha the only reason to keep on living. On the backdrop of the spectacular landscapes of Yavniel, Aisha lives on the foothills of the Atlas Mountains in her heart, refusing to uproot the tradition of her childhood landscape, as opposed to her 11 children who grew up to be Israelis.