This August 17th to 30th, the AICE israeli Film Festival 2015 will be screening their mix of colourful, powerful and controversial films in four cities at Palace Cinemas in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Perth.
This year, the festival is premiering a jam packed program of documentaries, feature films, and shorts in six unique categories; Blast from the Past, Queer Spot, Question of Faith, Culture Corner, First Course and On The Edge. The festival will also be feature Q&As with special guests and live music performances! And the dates are:
SYDNEY
Palace Verona & Palace Chauvel – August 17 to 30
MELBOURNE
Palace Como & Palace Brighton Bay – August 18 to 30
CANBERRA
Palace Electric City – August 18 to 30
PERTH
Palace Luna Leederville – August 20 to 26
The full programme for the AICE Israeli Film Festival 2015 is as follows (with a few surprises to be announced):
OPENING NIGHT
MATTI CASPI – CONFESSION (85 minutes)
What lies behind Matti Caspi’s mask like face? In this cinematic confessional, one of Israel’s greatest musicians reveals his innermost secrets. Caspi relates his tale of growing up in the 1950s in a family bereft of affection, his rise to stardom in an army ensemble, the quantum leap to fame with a string of commercial hits and then his exile to the USA after a very public fall from grace. Full of songs, intimate moments and humour this is as much a film about an Israel of the past as it is a searing personal biography of a living legend.
Directors: Dalia Mevorach, Dani Dothan
Production: Uri Borreda, Shemi Shoenfeld, Amital Menelzon.
PRINCESS (90 minutes)
Princess dives into a complex world of intolerable love, sensuality and sexuality set within an alternative definition of family. Adar, a 12 year old girl, neglected by her workaholic mum and hungry for love and attention, finds herself drawn into the fun and games of her “over attentive” stepfather. She meets the homeless Alan, a dreamy mysterious boy, her mirror image and brings him home. They embark on a dark journey between childhood and adolescence, reality and fantasy.
Director: Tali Shalom Ezer
Producer: Ead Gavesh, Leon Edery, Moshe Edery
Winner Best Feature film, Best actor, Best Composer, Best cinematographer Jerusalem film festival 2014
CULTURE CORNER
CLOCKWORK DOLL-DAHLIA RAVIKOVITCH (52 minutes)
“The poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch emerges from an extraordinary personal uniquely wonderful place. Other poets strive repeatedly to achieve all that is naturally present in her poems.” (Baruch Kurzwell, literary critic, 1959)
The life of Dahlia Ravokovitch – poet, translator and peace activist – was a wonderful gift to Hebrew culture. Winner of the major Israeli poetry prizes, she established herself as a powerful female voice in a predominantly masculine world. In her personal life, she struggled with depression and fluctuated between intense vitality and an ardent passion to partake in any moral and political discussion.
This film is ultimately a celebration of a highly talented and fiercely independent poetic voice.
Director Ruth Walk.
Production: Lizan Atzmor, Yael Perlov.
Screens with
LIVING ROOM 19 minutes
This short is the first film by Tali Shalom Ezer, who directed the feature PRINCESS, also included in this year’s programme. Can a daughter ever escape her mother’s influence?
Director: Tali Shalom Ezer.
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A KING (80 minutes)
Nissim Aloni was a king of the Hebrew Theatre. The magical realm he created on stage, together with a stellar cast of collaborators (including Yosl Bergner as the set designer) brimmed with imagination and poetry. He gave voice to a new spirit in the development of Israeli theatre; it was a bold, gutsy and political vision, full of lofty dreams and all too short lived. In a world dominated by functionaries, Aloni eventually found he was a king in exile, without a kingdom, without an audience, to share his dreams. But what a time it was!
Director : Doron Djerassi.
Producers : Doc Films/Doron Djerassi.
THE WANDERING MUSE (93 minutes)
From the plaintive cry of the ram horn to the boom-boom of the beat box, this production is a sonic exploration of Jewish identity through the music of the Diaspora.
Forget about your winter holidays, The Wandering Muse is a total geographical and musical trip. From a tango infused klezmer bar in Argentina, down to a Berlin cellar chanting 1920s Yiddish song, up through an ancient Moroccan synagogue – with the alluring songstress Vanessa Paloma – and into a congregation in rural Uganda chanting Hebrew prayers in East African harmonies. Cantors, hip hoppers, and subversive Russian poets all groove together in this celebration of a world of harmony beyond politics and national borders.
Languages: English, French, German, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Luganda
Spanish, Ancient Hebrew.
ROCK IN THE RED ZONE (87 minutes)
A story of love, politics and music set on the front line in the desert town of Sderot. When LA documentary maker, Laura Bialis travelled to Sderot to research a documentary about the music scene in Sderot little did she realise it would flip her life on its head. This production is an outsider’s inside view of life on the front line, in a town under threat of rocket attacks, where citizens have only 15 seconds warning to get shelter. Set right in the heart of the musical community in Sderot – with appearances by Teapack, Micha Barton, Avi Vaknin and Knesiyat Hasechet – this is a passionate testament to a community who see themselves as forgotten by the mainstream of Israeli society and who are determined to be heard.
Director and Producer Laura Bialis.
ALIZA (60 minutes)
Aliza Rozen has a long list of credits in the Israeli film and TV industry: she most recently appeared on screen in Farewell Party (2014). Here she is the subject of a biographical piece by Tomer Heymann , one of Israel’s best known documentary film makers. Using material he shot in 1995 as a young student Heymann returns 20 years later to Rozen to make a professional film and persuade his reluctant subject into the spotlight. Ever feisty and temperamental Aliza’s relationship with the director drives the film in a “ warts and all “ portrayal. The production is notable for its rich content from Israel’s television’s vaults.
Director: Tomer Heymann
Screens with
SUMMER VACATION (22 mins; 30 secs)
A simple summer holiday with his family turns into a nightmare for the central character as he encounters his ex-male lover on the beach. Nominated for an Oscar ®, this short film has played all around the world to great acclaim.
Directors: Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon
YONA (100 minutes)
Based on the novel “Yona Wallach”, this film is a no holds barred depiction of the turbulent life of one of Israel’s greatest poets and is not for the faint hearted. Director Nir Bermann (whose earlier feature, Broken Wings, features in the archival section of this year’s program ) states that he wants Yona’s audience to know the “price to be paid for devoting life and death to art.”
Yona opens in the early 1960s, as she struggles for recognition in a chauvinistic world. Her ascent to the heights of Israel’s poetry scene and a world of free love and drugs is accompanied by an equally rapid descent into mental breakdown and the controversial practice of treating patients with LSD.
Director Nir Bergmann.
ON THE EDGE
LAST STOP (76 minutes)
Set in and around the vicinity of Central Bus station in South Tel Aviv this is a disturbing portrait of contemporary Israeli life. Around the station live thousands of refugees – it’s the epicentre of Israel’s Eritrean and Sudanese communities – along with impoverished Israeli families who feel like strangers in their own homes. They are not shy about making their feelings known – that’s for sure.
The production is gritty and direct. The filmmakers hit the streets to reveal the perspective of the new immigrants and the second-generation migrant workers with little identity of their own. Locals take to the streets to vent their collective spleens about the radical changes in their community. Stand by to be confronted.
Director: Julie Shles.
HOT LINE (99 minutes)
Hotline is a small NGO dedicated to promoting the rights of refugees and uninformed migrants in Israel. The production is an insider’s perspective on its activities; behind closed doors at detention centres, legal aid hearings and feisty public policy sessions at the Knesset the filmmakers paint a vivid picture of the legal and financial limbo faced by many of Israel’s new African immigrants.
The volunteers at Hotline are fierce in their determination to pursue migrant’s rights and not let them be swallowed up by government regulation. As vibrant a democracy as Israel is, it still faces fundamental challenges about who can become a citizen and what its responsibilities are as a state. For the people caught in the current net – many of them already the victims of human trafficking – their only hope is Hotline.
Director: Sylvia Landsmann
MOM IS NOT CRAZY (74 minutes)
Diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Amira took her husband Michael to meet her therapist on their second date. He didn’t run away. This film is a frank account of her family’s internal struggles to maintain a sense of normality.
Amira’s efforts to cope with the disease are challenging, confronting and highly emotional. No stone is left unturned as the filmmaker’s poke their lenses into intimate corners. Beyond the issues of coping with everyday life, this film also poses a deep questioning of how to live with a psychological otherness within the parameters of Jewish law and society.
Director : Mordechai Vardi
Producers: Mordechai Vardi and Ami Drozci
Screens with
THE GARDEN (16 minutes)
Part of a series of tributes to Israel’s cinematic past, this is a comic rift on the film, Drifting. It’s a satire set behind the scenes during the outdoor filming of a gay zombie musical. But the director, in lust with his male leads, does everything he can to destroy the filming and then show us what really can happen in the park after dark.
Director Hod Winter
DEFENSE FILES (3 x 35 minutes)
Part of a longer series for television, these three episodes are an unrepentant glimpse at public defenders and the criminals they represent. Attorney client privilege has been lifted for the first time in Israel to present the criminal justice system in a hyper-realistic way:
Money
These cases include the stories of a security guard accused of stealing shampoo and olive oil from a supermarket, an unemployed man charged with attempting to defraud Social Security, and a senior port official, accused of accepting a bribe. While the attorneys fight for the lives of the indigent they must also defend serial fraudsters and swindlers.
Death
This episode delves into the deepest fears of each of us, while peering into the darker corners of life. The attorneys defend a driver who killed a pedestrian, a pre-school teacher charged over the death of a toddler, and a tractor driver accused of being responsible for a guest worker’s death.
Family
Violence and sex crimes occur frequently within the family. The cases in this episode include a father who denies that he raped his daughter, a boy charged with threatening his mother with a knife, and a man accused of beating his wife. Every morning defense attorneys leave their own families behind and head to the courts to confront the reality of broken homes.
QUEER SPOT
Programme 1
PROBATION TIME (90 minutes)
Winner of Best Film at Doc Aviv 2014, this film is a complicated family portrait centred on the story of Ariela, an Ethiopian girl, adopted by the director’s parents. As one of nine older siblings, Ariela’s path has forced her family to contend with a whole range of issues including alcoholism, petty thefts and prison.
How far can family ties be stretched and how much love can one woman have for her children? As a fierce keeper of the peace, this mother is truly tested as the fragile bonds that keep a family together are pushed to the maximum. Ariela’s path to rehabilitation from a prison sentence is a bumpy one, echoed by the filmmaker’s dissolving relationship with her girlfriend and the immediate question of how to bring up her own child.
Director: Avigail Sperber
Programme 2
SHORTER STUFF – A collection of short dramas and shorts with queer themes:
ZAZALAND (14 minutes)
Part of a series of tributes to Israel’s cinematic past, this is a comic play on thefilm, Late Marriage. Set in a Georgian family, it takes the form of a coming out of the closet for the central character. While he makes passionate and noisy love to his boyfriend in his bedroom downstairs, two matchmaking parties assemble to decide on his bride to be.
Director: Maayan Cohen
HORO (9 minutes)
Yoav Brill studied animation at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. This is his filmpoem about holding hands in public and where you can and can’t in contemporary Israel.
Director Yoav Brill
CROSSING (40 minutes)
A drag queen trio performs at underground queer parties in Jerusalem. After a year performing together, they are facing their final appearance. The film follows them in the days leading to their last show, as their personal lives, conflicts and critique are e expressed on stage.
Director: Inbar Horesh
Albi and Alma (15 minutes)
Two 17-year-old best friends, Albi and Alma, a gay boy and a straight girl, go searching for “true love”. A degrading experience with “mister wrong” changes their plans.
Director: Tom Nesher
GEVALD (16 minutes)
Gevald was born out of a sense of urgency as the queer community in Jerusalem faced real and serious threats. It was a spontaneous initiative by members of the queer community from within the film industry as well as outside of it, who volunteered to create together a no-budget film and express the voices of protest to the infuriating homophobic attitude towards them. The whole film was made by members of the local community, on both sides of the camera. The story is based on real figures and the participants are non-actors.
Director: Netalie Brown
Programme 3
MARZIPAN FLOWERS ( 74 minutes )
Winner of the Best Independent film at 2014 Jerusalem Film Festival and nominated for an Israeli Academy Award, “Marzipan Flowers” is a unique and highly original piece of film making. It tells the story of Hadas, a handsome 48-year-old widow who decides to escape kibbutz life and move to the big smoke of Tel Aviv.
There, she finds unexpected help and support from her new roommate, Petel, a transgender woman with a mysterious and colorful past. The two form a friendship and soon discover they have much more in common than they imagined.
Programme 1
PARTNER WITH THE ENEMY (60 minutes)
In the midst of the ever-fraught Israeli-Palestinian political landscape, two women, one Israeli and one Palestinian, attempt the seemingly impossible: to build a business together. Fighting against societal and family pressure, anti-normalisation currents and a chauvinistic, male-dominated industry, the two combine forces to create a logistics company to help Palestinian businessmen navigate the absurdities surrounding Israeli control of the West Bank. But while they help their clients overcome the obstacles , the divisions between them threaten to tear their partnership apart.
Directors and Producers: Duki Dror and Chen Shelach
IN THE SHADOW OF KING DAVID (25 minutes)
Living with King David is a challenge. Just ask the people of Silwan, a Palestinian village just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Since the first excavations began in the mid 19th century, archaeologists have come to this picturesque village, spade in hand, hunting for the legendary biblical city of King David. But, in the past ten years, this obsession with antiquities risks ruining the lives of the people who live here as a constant threat of demolition hovers over their homes. Is the past more important than the present? Or is there another agenda?
Director
Natasha Dudinski
Programme 2
Happy Purim (60 minutes) – WORLD PREMIERE
This World premiere of Ori Gruder’s new film – is based on Purim , the happiest day in the Jewish calendar . “A-Freilach Purim” (Happy Purim in Yiddish) goes deep inside the Ultra-Orthodox community. Filmmaker Ori Gruder, himself a religious Jew, takes us behind the scenes into another world and deep into the heart of the Haredi society. The Purim injunction to get drunk is followed to the letter of the law. What a party!
Director: Ori Gruder
Demeters Spring (21 minutes)
Draws a portrait of the cemetery at Kibbutz Givat Hashlosha, one of the few secular cemeteries in Israel. It observes the cemetery as it withers and blooms again during one year. Between being and nonbeing, holes are bored open in the earth, “reserved” signs are planted and empty plastic chairs await their sitters.
Director: Daphna Miro
Programme 2
VICE VERSA (62 minutes)
Can we repent? Can we go back in time? It is a question posed at the start of this short drama based on a novel. It probes an innocent relationship between a religious Yeshiva scholar and an 18-year-old cancer patient. Against all family and rabbinical advice, the relationship blossoms. With no other outcome but a tragic one this production presents a deep portrait of love, faith and repentance that transcends the rules of religion, society and faith.
Director: Amichai Greenberg
Producers: Inbal Levi and Amichai Greenberg
VEGETATIVE LOVE (33 minutes)
Set across the urban landscapes and desert plains of Israel and Palestine thisfilm follows five different characters and their special relationships with trees. From the Arab olive farmer to the contemporary Israeli Bonsai cultivator this is a moving cinematic meditation about the place of man in nature.
Director: Dror Shoret
Programme 3
THE CHAOS WITHIN (85 minutes)
A prayer for peace and a dissection of a mother son relationship – this documentary turns autobiography upside down and back to front. Mother Faigele Ashlag, once married to one of Bnei Barak’s greatest rabbis, teaches the Kabbalah and dominates the screen. Her son attempts to puts his life together, post his abandonment of Judaism and his addiction to heroin. The film is a wrestle with himself, with the camera and his whole being . “ I love you so much and hate you so much,” says his mother; no wonder he has had to battle to find a way to save his world. The film exposes ten years of a fight for what seems least possible, a home.
Director: Yakov Yanai Lein
Producer: Sylvain Biegeleisen
Programme 4
ALMOST FRIENDS (60 minutes)
Less than 70 kilometers separate Lod and Tlamim, but the residents are a world apart. Through an education program aimed at bridging gaps in Israeli society, sixth grade students from a secular school in the impoverished city of Lod and a religious school in the settlement of Tlamim are paired as online pen pals. Samar, an Arab girl from Lod and Linor, a settler who lived in Gush Katif, represent the extremes of these differences. Still, a spark is ignited in their online relationship and a friendship is formed. But when the two girls have the opportunity to meet, their families enter into a profound and complex experience.
Directors: Barak Heyman and Nitzan Ofir
JERUSALEM ER (17 minutes)
Hadassah Hospital is located in the ethnically charged buffer zone of Mount Scopus. This is the story of the ER as through the eyes of two female doctors, one a Jewish immigrant from Chile, and the other a Palestinian Israeli from the north of Israel.
Director: Hilla Medalia
Programme 5
MEKIMI (TV Series – 5 episodes )
Mekimi is a five-episode drama based on a bestseller book by Noa Yaron-Dayan, who was a popular and well-loved host on the IDF radio station.
Popular Israeli actress Yael Poliakov plays Alma, a young media star living in Tel Aviv in the early 90s. From the outside she has all the ingredients for a successful life: money, fame and a great boyfriend. But in reality, there is a black hole in Alma’s heart. Entering her life and stealing her heart is film student Ben, a dark, mysterious anarchist (played by musician Daniel Mooke Niv). The two fall deeply in love, at times appearing to be one another’s salvation, and at other times seeming to pull one another into the depths of oblivion.
Director: Ram Nehari
Producer: Yifat Prestelnik
BLASTS FROM THE PAST
Waltz with Bashir (2008 – 87 minutes)
Director Art Folman’s animated documentary premiered in Cannes in 2008 : its audacity and the boldness of its cinematic vision marked it as a standout title. The subject matter is repressed memory – specifically, the memories of Folman and his friends’ involvement as soldiers in the Israeli war against Lebanon in 1982.
Using flash-animation, hand-drawn techniques and computer-enhanced 3D modelling, Folman’s work of art is still a highlight of this year’s archival programme.
“Transmuted via novel use of animation into something special, strange and peculiarly potent.” – Variety
Director: Ari Folman
Producers: Ari Folman, Yael Nahlieli, Serge Lalou, Gerhard Meixnew, Roman Paul
Metzizm (Peeping Toms) (1972 – 90 minutes)
When you think of Tel Aviv you see images of beaches and sun and a bohemian life style. When you think of Israeli comedies you think of this cult classic located on Tel Aviv’s Metzizm beach. Uri Zohar, who also directed the film, and Arik Einstein, one of Israel’s greatest musicians, stars in this story of two friends who don’t want to age. Zohar plays an aging hippy lifeguard who refuses to grow up and spends most of his days fighting peepers in the public baths (and spying on his friends’ lovemaking) while Eli ( Einstein) dreams of building a nightclub in a local restaurant. Viewed through today’s moral lenses it could be seen as macho and sexist but it’s still a whole lotta fun.
Director: Uri Zohar
Avanti Popolo (1986 – 84 minutes)
Named after the Italian communist anthem, Avanti Popolo burst onto the filmscene when it won the coveted Golden Leopard prize in Locarno in 1986. It was a mini revolution in Israeli film making – for the first time two Arab actors starred in lead roles as they played the role of two Egyptian soldiers trying to find their way back to the front line on the Suez Canal after the cease fire in the 1967 war. Full of irony, deep humanity and a sense of absurdity, Avanti Popolo stands as one of the best contemporary dramas about the surreal nature of war.
Director: Rafi Bukaee
Broken Wings (2002 – 87 minutes )
A touching domestic drama about an Israeli family, shattered by the recent death of the head of the household. Dafna, the financially strapped widow with her four kids, has to juggle her nightshifts at Haifa hospital to keep all the emotional balls afloat. In the process she entrusts her teenagers – Maya, an aspiring singer and composer for a rock band and Yair, a once promising basketball player – to care for the youngest kids.
In this emotional roller coaster stakes Broken Wings has got it all; Nir Bergman’s debut film is full of passion, energy and a deep sense of love.
Director: Nir Bergman
Sallah Shabati (1963 – 1 hour 45 minutes)
One of the most popular films in the history of Israeli cinema, this Oscar® nominated comedy catapulted Chaim Topol to international fame, resulting in his celebrated role in Fiddler on the Roof. Topol plays Sallah, an Oriental Jew who arrives with his wife and seven kids in 1949. Despite the bureaucracy’s efforts to get Sallah to work, he prefers to play sheshbesh (backgammon) and find other ways to support his family. But this new citizen becomes an unlikely hero when he uncovers corruption in Israel’s housing industry. A stellar cast includes Gila Almagor and Arik Einstein.
Director: Ephraim Kishon
81st Blow (1975-1977, 115 min)
Recently restored by the Jerusalem Cinematheque and presented at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the 81st Blow is compiled entirely of historical footage and photographs. It tells of Jewish life in Europe, of the emergence of National Socialism, of exultant German crowds, of pogroms, extermination, and finally of small acts of resistance and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The soundtrack is made up of statements made at the trial of Adolf Eichmann and a score composed especially for the film. The title comes from a boy in the Przemysl ghetto was given 80 lashes that almost killed him. Later, the fact that no one believed him, felt like the 81st blow.
FIRST COURSE
First Course is a selection of the finest Israeli short films in a wide range of styles – from fiction to animation and even a dash of horror. Have you seen the one about the donkey and the soldier written by Edgar Keret? It’s hidden amongst this collection alongside the work of Israel’s most promising and award winning directors.
Programme includes
What About Me (Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen)
To Kill A Bumblebee (same directors as Summer Vacation)
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