Israeli Films
Feature Films
World Premiere
511 students attend "Hayarden," an elementary school for refugee and immigrant children in south Tel Aviv. In a year in which fellow foreign and immigrant workers and families are being expulsed from his neighborhood, one of the classes is chosen to participate in a unique cinematic project: They are asked to create a short drama film about their lives.
Special Screening and a Meeting with David Broza
In early 2013 Israeli singer-songwriter David Broza went to a Palestinian studio in East Jerusalem, together with American, Israeli and Palestinian musicians – including Steve Earle, Mira Awad and Muhammad Mughrabi – pursuing his years-old dream to make music a bridge-builder between Palestinians and Israelis.
In a rare look at the region, Udi Aloni filmed his protagonists as they launched their new struggle. Finally refused re-entry by the Indian government, Aloni was forced to tell the rest of this story far from the land and people he had come to admire creation, a feast for the senses which capable of restoring our faith in the human spirit.
In this special event held in commemoration of film director and scholar Judd Ne'eman, we offer an opportunity to watch rarely screened four Israeli shorts about the occupation of the West Bank and participate in a discussion organized in collaboration with the Israeli Filmmakers Forum Against the Occupation.
What young woman would leave New York to have her first child in a war zone? Who would choose to give birth in a place where kids get blown up riding on school buses or sitting in cafés? Where thousands of eighteen-years-olds kill or get killed as soldiers? I am that woman. I went home to give birth to my daughters in Israel.
World Premiere
David is a sensitive and creative boy who lives in peripheral southern Israel with his MS sick mother and his father. He comes across an online writing forum, fakes his identity and under a fictitious name publishes his short stories. As he gets entangled in his lies, he is afraid of losing his friends and being exposed.
Moved by the destruction on Sept. 11 Aloni returned to Israel/ Palestine to grapple with the concepts of sacrifice and the sacred embedded in the history of a much more ancient edifice - the Temple Mount. The heart of the film is Udi's effort to understand the theological-political background he inherited from his mother, Shulamit Aloni. Images of mutations of Walter Benjamin's angel haunt the film from beginning to end. "Local Angel" is both challenging to the observer, and deeply moving.
Art/Violence follows two of his students from Jenin as they redefine their identity as artists and women after his death. Facing military occupation and societal oppression, they surround themselves with a group of young and radical Palestinian artists armed with fidelity to art, sisterhood and Palestine.
In 1978, filmmaker Yulie Cohen was wounded in a terrorist attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A stewardess for the Israeli airline El Al, she was attacked along with other crewmembers when getting off the bus to the hotel in London. In a remarkable twist of faith, twenty-three years later Cohen began questioning the causes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians and started to consider helping release the man who almost killed her, Fahad Mihyi.
