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Young journalist Yael visits a small community of outcasts, Jews and Arabs, who live together in a forgotten enclave at the “border” between Jaffa and Bat Yam, in Israel. She discovers a range of characters far removed from the usual clichés. Their relation to time is different than that of the city around them. In this dilapidated and fragile place, there is a possibility of coexistence.Read More »
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Rivka is happily married to Meir, but they remain childless. The yeshiva’s rabbi, who is Meir’s father, wants Meir to divorce Rivka. Rivka’s sister, Malka, is in love with Yakov, a Jew shunned by the yeshiva as too secular. The rabbi arranges Malka’s marriage to Yossef, whose agitation when fulfilling religious duties approaches the grotesque. Can the sisters sort out their hearts’ desires?Read More »
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A slice of life – day after day – in Haifa, where Moshe and Didi’s marriage is on the rocks, affairs are casual, and Moshe’s angst about health, his parents, sex, communication, and business are pervasive and existential. Moshe’s mother is Jewish, his father an Arab; his father may or may not sell ancestral land; his wife and mistress have lovers, one is a close friend; much of Moshe’s surroundings seem under construction or in renovation. A cousin watches a security monitor without comment. Is there allegory in this portrait of an anxious Israeli approaching middle age?Read More »
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Laila In Haifa is set over one fateful night in a club in the port town of Haifa and explores the interweaving stories of five women. The film aims to present a snapshot of contemporary life in one of the last remaining spaces where Israelis and Palestinians come together to engage in face-to-face relationships.Read More »
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With an ensemble cast of both Israeli and Palestinian actors, “Laila in Haifa” explores the interweaving stories of five women set over one night in a club in the port town of Haifa. Laced with wry humor, Amos Gitai presents a candid snapshot of contemporary life in one of the last remaining spaces where Israelis and Palestinians come together to engage in face‐to‐face relationships.Read More »
Or shoulders a lot: she’s 17 or 18, a student, works evenings at a restaurant, recycles cans and bottles for cash, and tries to keep her mother Ruthie from returning to streetwalking in Tel Aviv. Ruthie calls Or “my treasure,” but Ruthie is a burden. She’s just out of hospital, weak, and Or has found her a job as a house cleaner. The call of the quick money on the street is tough for Ruthie to ignore. Or’s emotions roil further when the mother of the youth she’s in love with comes to the flat to warn her off. With love fading and Ruthie perhaps beyond help, Or’s choices narrow.Read More »
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Hagit, a young woman with mild mental deficiency, works in a toilet-paper factory. She lives with her mother Sarah, a divorcée who gave up her life for her daughter. Hagit strives for independence and Sarah is torn between her desire to protect her, and her own will to live. When a relationship develops between her and the son of the factory owner, Hagit hides it from her mother. The announcement of the closing of the factory shakes Hagit and Sarah’s life and jeopardizes Hagit’s love story.Read More »
Joy Levine lives in an old apartment that, in complete contrast to her, is shabby and worn-out on the outside while well-kept and filled with joy on the inside. Her life changes when she auditions for a TV show called “Gotta Be Happy”. To her astonishment, she is chosen, and her mission is to throw a surprise party for her parents on the upcoming show. However, there is a price to pay for all this: she has to let the viewers into her private inner world and share with them an event that has been overshadowing her family’s life and hers for the past 22 years; an event that made a tight-knit bunch of friends shun her parents, Chaya and Yitzhak Levine. Read More »
The recreation of the establishment of a nineteenth century settlement in Eretz Yisrael by ten Russian Jews. They had to build the land and also contend with the Arab resentment and the Turkish military.Read More »