Recommendations for Selichot Programs This Year

 I have tried to choose subjects which are particularly relevant this year.

PTSD

In the post October7th, 2023 period, and during this ongoing war, we have begun to see the terrible effects of war and trauma.  Literally thousands of Israelis, mostly young soldiers, are suffering from some form of post traumatic stress.  Although made before October 7^th, 50 Broken Pieces, directed by Micha Amitai, is a strikingly moving documentary film (70 minutes) which provides a portrayal of two men in crisis and offers us a glimpse into how shellshock can affect a person’s life.  

A Memoir by Renen Schorr

Renen Schorr was well-known in Israel for two major achievements – he directed the iconic coming-of-age film, Late Summer Blues (1986), and he was the founding director for 30 years of the Sam Spiegel Film and TV School in Jerusalem.  He died just a few months ago.

In his sophisticated documentary film, Wake Up, Grandson – Letters to My Rebellious Rabbi (המעורר) (93 minutes), Schorr has combined three elements -- a personal memoir, the story of the state of Israel (since its establishment in 1948), and the story of his grandfather who had a profound impact on his life.  

I suggest that you recommend to your participants to watch LateSummer Blues before coming to see this highly recommended memoir!

Looking Back Two Years

The story of the terrible massacre that occurred at a roadside shelter (מיגונית) near Kibbutz Re’im on that terrible day, October 7^th, 2023, can be seen in its entirety in the hard-hitting documentary film The Last Recording (Hebrew title: Death Shelter: The Last Recording), by Assaf Liberman and Nadav Ben Zur.  Here is the story that so many people have heard – the terrorists threw grenades into the shelter and Aner, repeatedly picked them up and threw them back out.  He was a true hero.  This is when his friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, lost his hand. 

Holocaust Memory

Perhaps you would prefer a feature film, instead of a documentary? 

The Property, directed by Dana Modan, is a Holocaust feature film that includes a bit of romance, some nostalgia, a lot of humor and an array of quirky characters. 

 

Documentary Film about Singer Dafna Armoni made by her daughter, Ella Armoni

Girl, Woman ((ספק ילדה, ספק אשה, directed by Ella Armoni, is a fascinating and masterful work of art.  It offers the portrait of two women – mother and daughter – one a singer and the other a filmmaker.

The mother, Dafna Armoni, was an iconic singer with a painful story.  As a young woman, she sang in Avi Nesher’s 1978 cult film, The Troupe (aka Sing Your Heart Out) about an army singing troupe. She was a singing sensation, and over the years she shared a stage with, among others,  Shalom Hanoch, Arik Einstein, the Dag HaNachash – all of which we see in archival clips. At the age of 37, she gave birth to twins – Ella and Eden. The father of the twins has been a well-kept secret all these years.

The daughter, Ella, is a filmmaker.  Now, at the age of 30, she is making a film about her mother and about their complicated relationship.

Today, Dafna is a lonely and depressed woman with financial difficulties.  While cleaning out her cluttered apartment, she gives Ella a small suitcase that she tells her to keep for her and not to open.  Obviously, Ella opens it anyway, and finds it filled with letters from her father whose identity was always a secret, and many video recordings of the twins as little children back in the 90s, as if these recordings were made as return letters to the secret father.

Girl, Woman (documentary, 2025, 80 minutes) is an extraordinary film, filled with angst, introspection and love.  It is available from Go2Films.

 

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