Israel

Synopsis:
Director Elia_Suleiman uses a mixture of romantic comedy and quirky humor to shed light on the problems of Palestinians in Yadon Ilaheyya (Divine Intervention). E.S. (Suleiman and his girlfriend Manal_Khader), because they live in separate cities, must meet near an Israeli checkpoint. The film is little more than a series of usually comic but occasionally poignant scenes in which Suleiman and others must confront any number of Israeli nemeses. Suleiman’s second film, Divine Interventions, was screened in competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

— Perry Seibert, RoviRead More »

Plot Outline: a story of one woman’s personal battle for acceptance, but also a portrait of a political movement that has forever affected millions of lives in the Middle East.Read More »

Interview with David Perlov
© Uri Klein, Haaretz, Sep. 29 1993
When you made In Jerusalem did you consciously plan to make a film
that was different, of a kind we’d never seen before?
“Yes, I was aware of the difference. In the film I interview an old man, a
religious photographer, who tells me, ‘No one took photographs in the Holy
Land before me. I was the first.’ I, too, said this while I was filming, but only to
myself. I had a feeling that I was doing something decisive for myself and also
for Israeli filmmaking.Read More »

Quote:
Three Palestinian women living in an apartment in Tel Aviv try to find a balance between traditional and modern culture.Read More »

Storyline: When Eyal finishes the week of mourning for his late son, his wife urges him to return to their routine but instead he gets high with a young neighbor and sets out to discover that there are still things in his life worth living for.Read More »

The 1967 ‘Six-Day’ war ended with Israel’s decisive victory; conquering Jerusalem, Gaza, Sinai and the West Bank. It is a war portrayed, to this day, as a righteous undertaking – a radiant emblem of Jewish pride. One week after the war, a group of young kibbutzniks, led by renowned author Amos Oz, recorded intimate conversations with soldiers returning from the battlefield. The recording revealed an honest look at the moment Israel turned from David to Goliath. The Israeli army censored the recordings, allowing the kibbutzniks to publish only a fragment of the conversations. ‘Censored Voices’ reveals the original recordings for the first time.Read More »

From imdb: I believe Hanoch Levin is Israel’s only great playwright. He’s best known for stark, stylized black humor about petty people who are unaware of their own pettiness. It’s a little as if Samuel Beckett were writing about Ralph Kramden. I’ve never seen a good translation of his work. The best representation on film is _Floch_. While not exactly sugar-coated, it’s a mite more pleasant than many of his stage plays. Read More »

THE FAREWELL PARTY is a compassionate dark comedy about friendship and knowing when to say goodbye. A group of friends at a Jerusalem retirement home build a machine for self-euthanasia in order to help their terminally ill friend. When rumors of the machine begin to spread, more and more people ask for their help, and the friends are faced with an emotional dilemmaRead More »

On the day of his father’s funeral, the curious and meddlesome adolescent Nadav (Aviv Elkabeth) peeps in through the window of the funeral home where the rabbi is making last minute preparations for the burial, a task that involves calling an unreliable, impatient repairman during a torrential rain in order to fix a chronically squeaky gurney wheel. Ordering the technician to remain throughout the services in an attempt to ensure the soundness of his repair work, the somber proceeds from the idiosyncratic point of view of the erratic wheel as it precariously wobbles out of stability and back into its familiar, irritating din. The seemingly surreal, deceptively lyrical opening sequence provides an elegantly conceived framework for filmmaker Savi Gabizon’s elegantly modulated tragicomedy.Read More »