In the shadow of the disengagement from Gaza, west from Ramallah, a new city is under construction, Kiriyat Sefer. In the early hours of the morning, some construction workers from a neighboring Palestinian village, Bilin, walk towards another day of work. Unemployed since the early days of the Second Intifada and drowned into financial debts, Maher Hatib, is forced to work, ag...
Michal has been bed-ridden for over three years. She suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The uncurable disease prevents her from normal functioning. Between hospital stays, Michal is also a wife and mother of two children. While her adolescent daughter is helping her father to take care of the house, Michal is accompanied by her 7-year old son. The boy does not understa...
Poignant meditation on family, loss, and the mental maps of homelessness. The film navigates the intimate lives of 5 brothers and their mother, over the course of a decade, through the pains of exile and the joys of family bonding. Exploring the politics of belonging, displacement, and homosexuality, the film examines the hard decisions one Israeli family has to make and the in...
With this title referring to Beckett, VIFF programmer and director Mark Peranson sketches the evolution of Albert Serra’s masterful El cant dell ocells. Peranson filmed the production process filled with improvisation and minimal acting as a quest to a serene visual language that speaks for itself. Quite funny as well, obviously.
In this 'making of' about Albert Serra’s latest ...
Kibbutz Maoz Chaim children's house, 1943. A gunshot rings out, followed by silence.11-year-old Dvor'aleh is orphaned. She was told that her mother was killed by a stray bullet during weapons training, but soon begins hearing the word "*******" whispered among the kibbutz members. Dvora is deeply troubled: was it an accident or was it ******* If it was *******, how could her m...
Raymonde - diva, queen, enigma, inspiration, survivor, widow, woman, and mother. Armed with a camera, Yael Abecassis followed her mother and stepped into a world where she had always been a stranger. "You know, daughter, Morocco is a kind of therapy," Raymonde says, and for the first time, they embark on a journey together: from a childhood in the mellah of Casablanca to the du...
Fifty years after Slow Down by Avraham Heffner won a prize at Venice Film Festival, top alumni of the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School challenge the 1968 legendary black and white thirteeen-minute short, which penetrates the essence of a quarrel and reconciliation between an elderly couple in Tel Aviv of 1967. The voice over stream of consciousness of the ******e's poignant se...
The film follows three protagonists who have bound their lives together. Elad is a young man who went in for a simple operation but ended up disabled. Despite his plight he chose life. Rinat, his former girlfriend, came back to him after the operation and married him. For ten years they were unable to bear children. Einav, a single mother, chooses to be a surrogate mother for f...
I Am Ahmad, a 1966 13 min. revelatory short, was originally censored before its stormy release. In the film, a nave Arab manual laborer from the periphery of pre-1967 Israel tries again and again – and is repeatedly refused – to rent an apartment in Jewish and liberal Tel Aviv.
Fifty years later, top Arab and Jewish alumni of the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School conduct a poi...
The Museum is a film that observes, examines and ponders Israel's most important cultural institution, the Israel Museum. The film follows the visitors, observes the observers, listens to the speakers and descends to the storerooms, labs and conference rooms. The American museum director, the singing security guard, the Jerusalemite curator, the Haredi kashrut inspector, the Pa...