Three More Feature Films from the Jerusalem Film Festival repertoire

I just want to mention three more Israeli features that I saw last week at the Jerusalem Film Festival --

Mama, directed by Or Sinai, is a film about the loneliness of a Polish woman, working in Israel. Mila (beautifully portrayed by Evgenia Dodina) is employed as a housekeeper/chef for a wealthy family. Her loneliness has driven her into the embrace of the family’s African gardener.  When cleaning the ceiling fans, Mila falls off the ladder and breaks her arm.  This leads her to a well-needed vacation back home in Poland, where she rediscovers her husband who is having an affair, her daughter is pregnant, and her home is crumbling.  Mila has to decide where she belongs.

Mama is available from Intramovies geremia@intramovies.com

Cuz You’re Ugly, directed by Sharon Engelhart, is a film about a young woman soldier, her problems with her own self-image and her relationship with her teenage sister. Although the film contains too much vulgarity and is lacking in depth of character, it tries to evoke pathos and empathy by providing an intimate look at the two sisters. One sister is obsessed with obtaining an abortion and the other with getting laid.

Avigail is a soldier in the IDF. She is very overweight and she seems to have a chip on her shoulder. The external face that she shows everyone around her is a bit wild with a short fuse. Her army commander, although with some misgivings, has offered her to go to officer training and she is proud of that. When she goes home to Jerusalem for the weekend, we meet her 15-year-old sister, Naomi, and her dysfunctional mother.  As soon as she learns that Naomi is pregnant, Avigail gets right on the case, trying to figure out how to take care of the problem.

Avigail is still a virgin and she wants to change that.  Not until she meets a boy who, in an intimate moment, tells her that she’s beautiful, do we realize how important it is for her to have someone appreciate her for who she is.

Cuz You’re Ugly is available from the producer, Galit Cahlon, galia13@gmail.com

Houses is a debut film by Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum.

Sasha came to Israel as a child, during the immigration from the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s.  He decides to return to Tsfat, to the houses that his family lived in, in order to revisit his childhood, collect memories, and come to terms with past traumas.  At the premiere screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival, the filmmaker said, “This film is a journey into the past so that the present will appear to be more possible.”

This is a minimalist film, mostly in B&W, with color used only for the childhood memories which show Sasha as a little girl.  Today, Sasha prefers to be referred to as “he” and still corrects his mother when she insists on calling him “you” in the feminine.  “After all, I was there when you were born,” his mother says.

Houses is a film about loneliness, about relations with his mother, about wanting to shed the memories of childhood. The film is available from Marker Films, festivals@markerfilms.com

 

 

A Documentary about the Druze living on the Golan Heights -- Living between a Rock and a Hard Place

Together with my husband, Ron, I went to see On Thin Ice at the premiere screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival. This review is by both of us. 

If you have seen Syrian Bride, by Eran Riklis, then you know that the Druze on the Golan Heights are living between a rock and a hard place. The scene where the bride sits at the border fence, unable to leave Israel and unable to enter Syria, is a perfect metaphor for the contemporary situation of this community.

On Thin Ice, directed by Udi Kalinsky and Irit Hod, is a documentary film about the Druze living on the Golan Heights which was occupied by Israel after the Six Day War in 1967.  The area has been annexed to Israel since 1981 and the Druze who live there are encouraged to accept Israeli citizenship.

There are many issues that the Druze community of the Golan Heights faces.  One of them, not mentioned in the film, is taking place right now – the dangers that their Druze brethren are facing in Syria at this very moment.  At the premiere screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival this week, filmmaker Udi Kalinsky stated, “We pray with the community for the well-being of their brethren in Syria.”

Members of the Druze community who live in the northern Golan Heights have a complicated identity. The older generation feels that they are still “Syrians” since they were born in Syria and have many family members who still live on the other side of the border. On the other hand, the younger generation seeks to become integrated within Israeli society, and even to accept Israeli citizenship, for practical reasons, like passports for traveling, not for love of the Zionist state.  This complicated identity crisis is at the heart of this excellent film, which explores this issue carefully and sensitively through very well-done character portrayals.

The film was made over a three-year period.  In 2022, Aya is a 19-year-old Druze woman, playing ice hockey with a women’s team in Metullah.  She eventually progresses to the national team and is chosen to be a part of the group that will represent Israel at the upcoming international championships in Serbia.  The only complication is that Aya does not have Israeli citizenship and is not permitted to represent Israel unless she obtains Israeli citizenship and an Israeli passport.  Her father, Akram, is against her accepting Israeli citizenship but he puts the decision in her hands.

Her uncle, Ayoub, is clinging to his Syrian history, culture, and identity while intermingling with Jews all over the Galilee. He takes the filmmaker to meet many people in Majdal Shams to ask them about their identity. Ayoub is very concerned about the future of his town and about their identity crisis. In one very moving scene, he is holding his young granddaughter while watching the news and he wishes a better future for her than the bitter reality of the present.

Then the Israel-Hamas and Israel-Hezbollah wars break out in October 2023 and rockets from Lebanon are falling very close to Majdal Shams. In 2024 a Hezbollah rocket landed on a playground and killed 12 children in the middle of Majdal Shams, which was one of the greatest tragedies in this war, and which paradoxically connected this Druze community with the fate of the citizens of Israel, much more than they would have expected.   One of them was Ayoub’s 12-year-old grand-daughter.

In his speech at the Jerusalem Festival premiere screening, Ayoub –- who was very impressive both in the film and on the stage as a serious community leader -- pleaded for an end to the violence, an end to the ongoing war, and an end to the bloodshed.  His speech was inspirational as was this film, which portrayed a very complex issue in a sensitive and substantive way.

On Thin Ice (documentary, 92 minutes) is available from Hadar Porubanova at Ruth Films,  hadar@ruthfilms.com

 

Oxygen Wins Best Feature Film at the Jerusalem Film Festival

Just Announced at the Jerusalem Film Festival!

The award in the Haggiag Competition for best Israeli feature film is presented to:

Oxygen, directed by Netalie Braun, Producers: Aviv Ben Shlush, Adi Bar Yossef, Netalie Braun

The following are the remarks by the Jury:

“A radical reading of Israeli existence centered on a mother who boldly chooses to stop being a victim of the Israeli ethos, no matter the cost. The film is layered with endless facets of Israeli reality, presented from a new perspective, giving an almost biblical dimension to the story of a mother facing the sacrifice of her son. Director and screenwriter Netalie Braun deconstructs this ethos—from the liberation of Jerusalem to crawling on the carpet as a result of PTSD—dismantling the image of the Israeli hero. A film with an inner rhythm, powerful and tumultuous, conveyed through the eyes of an empathetic protagonist, with a marvelous performance by Dana Ivgy that almost physically conveys the country's collective helplessness.”

Bella is a brilliant satire about the relations between Jews and Arabs within Israel-Palestine

Here it is – my favorite film from among all the new Israeli films screened this week at the Jerusalem International Film Festival -- 

Bella represents a full collaboration between two directors, Zohar Shachar and Jamal Khalaily, an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab.  At the premiere event at the Jerusalem Film Festival this week, the audience was filled with many members of the cast and crew and their families – about half Jewish and half Arab. The speakers thanked the Gesher Multicultural Film Fund which supported the film from the very beginning. (I am proud to be part of the Gesher fund.)

This is a superb satire about the political situation. It is about the friendship between two couples, who are trying desperately to get a very special dove to a competition in Jerusalem. Zohar Shachar, in her opening remarks, said that in the making of the film, they met a lot of people, both Arabs and Jews who raise doves, and they found them to be definitely interesting and sometimes weird! 

The main character in the film is apparently the dove, named Bella. Yaki and his girlfriend Limor arrive from Europe for his father’s funeral.  Also attending the funeral is Yaki’s friend Bilal (married to Nargis) who has been working for his father.  Bilal insists that Yaki’s father left him the dove and, at first, Yaki is willing to give it to him.  But when they begin reading the text messages on his father’s phone, they realize that the dove is worth a lot of money.  So, Yaki and Limor drive over to Bilal’s house in Kfar Kassem (an Israeli Arab village in the Lower Galilee) to retrieve the dove, only to realize that Nargis refuses to let her husband be cheated out of the dove.  

When Bilal and Nargis and their extended family pile into cars to go to a family wedding in the West Bank (Area A under control of the Palestinian Authority), Yaki and Limor follow them.  A road trip ensues.  There is plenty of absurdity, comedy, political references, and heightened tension. It all begins when the Palestinian police stop them in Area A and then continues throughout.

This film is brilliant in many ways.  It portrays both couples as victims of the political situation, obsessed with similar thoughts about getting pregnant and having a family, and chasing after the dove while trying to get it to the competition in Jerusalem before it is too late. 

It was clever to use the dove (the harbinger of peace) as the element that brings the two couples together. 

You can’t miss the irony and absurdity when the dove isn’t permitted to cross the checkpoint and return to Israel because it doesn’t have a permit!

Information on the availability of Bella (feature film, 75 minutes) can be obtained from Hussein Akbaraly at LOSANGE FILMS h.akbaraly@filmsdulosange.fr

 

The Dreamer - a documentary about the well-known actor, Yosef Shiloah

The Dreamer, directed by Kobi Farag and Morris Ben-Mayor, opened this week at the Jerusalem Film Festival. The film is about the actor, writer and activist, Yosef Shiloah (1941-2011). Born in the part of Kurdistan that is part of Iran, he came to Israel with his parents at the age of 9. Shiloah appeared in dozens of films, both in Israel and abroad.  He is known for his roles in bourekas films (ethnic comedies), but my absolute favorites in which he appears in major roles are Passover Fever (directed by Shemi Zarchin) and Desperado Square (directed by Benny Torati).

Shiloah was also a writer, and much of what he has written is read to us by one of his daughters during the film.  He felt strongly that he remained a refugee all his life, an outsider due to his belonging to the Mizrahi ethnic group.

According to Shiloah, since Mizrahi Jews came from Arab lands and spoke Arabic, they had a certain affinity to Arab culture and a responsibility to working in the vanguard of bringing about a peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis.  His activism in this area was during the period of the 1^st and 2^nd intifadas and he was ostracized as a result, forcing him into exile with his family. 

The Dreamer (documentary, 105 minutes) is an important document about a man who was brave enough to speak up for peace even though it impacted severely on his life.  The film is available from Ben-Mayor & Farag Film Studio, benmayor.farag@gmail.com

  

We bring up our sons to be heroes and then we send them off to war. A serious look at how one mother copes.

Another Israeli feature film that opened at the Jerusalem Film Festival this week --  

Oxygen, directed by Netalie Braun, is a hard-hitting and serious look at Israeli mothers and what they are forced to face when their sons go off to serve in the military. We bring up our sons to become soldiers and heroes, but worry frantically when they go to serve in wartime.

Netalie Braun is well-known for two previous major films -- 

• the award-winning documentary, The Hangman
• Metamorphosis, a film which combines documentary and video art.

Anat and her son Ido, who is a soldier in the Golani unit, have a very special relationship. They go swimming in the sea together and are planning a trip to India when he is discharged from the army.  Anat is the daughter of an army general. She teaches in an elementary school, where she teaches the children about the glory and heroism of the Six Day War.  She is obviously fully supportive of the Israel Defense Forces.

When her son is preparing to be part of a military ground incursion into Lebanon, something inside her snaps and she begins to panic that something will happen to her son.  We are all asked to make sacrifices, but Anat does not want to lose her son whom she loves more than anything. She sets out on a journey to the Lebanese border to find her son and bring him home. Not succeeding in that, she begins to hatch a plan in which she thinks she can save him.

There is a scene in the film in which Anat locks the front door of their apartment and hides the key so that Ido cannot leave the house and return to his unit. This scene reminded me of another Israeli film, Present Continuous (2012) directed by Aner Preminger, which was also about a woman in crisis who wants only to protect her children.

Oxygen provides a platform for a remarkable performance by Dana Ivgy as the mother, panicked about losing her son. Both the mother – from her crisis mindset – and the son – due to his asthma – seem to be in need of oxygen!  At this time of ongoing war, are the mothers of Israel capable of protecting their children?

Details about availability can be obtained from Aviv Ben Shlush, Producer at ZOA Films, aviv@zoafilms.com or Adi Bar Yosef, Producer at Baryo Productions, adibaryo@gmail.com

The Sea - a Palestinian and Jewish collaboration

The Sea, directed by Shai Carmeli Pollack, is a film about the Occupation, about the walls that we put up between us, and about how they impact the simple dreams of a child.  The film was produced as a collaboration, between a Jewish director and a Palestinian producer. 

Khaled lives in a village in the West Bank, not far from Ramallah.  At the end of the school year, his class is going on a bus trip to the Mediterranean Sea.  All of the children are excited for this, since going to the beach is not a usual event for them.  On the way, they have to pass through a checkpoint in order to enter Israel. 

Khaled’s name does not appear on the list of those approved to pass through the checkpoint and he is sent back to the village.  Extremely disappointed, he decides to set out on his own. He wakes up in the middle of the night and sneaks out of the house to smuggle himself into Israel.  He experiences many encounters with Jews and Arabs alike who help him along the way. 

Worried about his son, his father, who works without a permit inside Israel, leaves the construction site where he is working, to go find his son, even though the risks of being caught without a permit are troubling. Both father and son encounter some wonderful people along the way.

Some films about the Occupation are hard-hitting, filled with violence and difficult to endure.  This one is different. It provides beautiful insight into a family, especially the life of a 12-year-old boy, and how difficult life can be for Palestinians living in the West Bank. I especially liked the character of Khaled’s grandmother, who has taken upon herself the difficult task of raising the four children since Khaled’s mother died of cancer two years earlier and the father is working to support them at a job inside Israel.

At the Jerusalem Film Festival premiere screening, which was filled with family and friends of the cast and crew, about half Palestinian and half Jewish, the film director said poignantly: “The making of this film, Arabs and Jews working together on the set, gives me a lot of hope.”  It is good to have some hope in these difficult days in Israel!

The Sea (93 minutes) provides a wonderful story. The film is available from the producer at Majdal Films, baheir@gmail.com

Shai Carmeli-Pollack also made Bil'in My Love (2006), one of the best documentaries about Israeli activists helping in the fight against the placement of the Separation Wall separating Palestinians from their lands. I never forgot one hard-hitting line from that film.  Standing on a hilltop at Bil'in in the West Bank, looking out at the horizon where you can catch a glimpse of Tel Aviv in the distance, someone says, You can see Tel Aviv from Bil'in, but you don't see Bil'in from Tel Aviv.  Wow. That was so true.  No one see or cares.