The most striking new trend is the diversity of filmmakers and the variety of stories told in their films.
By HANNAH BROWNStill from the movie 'Sand Storm'(photo credit: VERED ADIR)
All movie industries, especially small ones, go in cycles, and 2016 will be remembered as a phenomenal year for Israeli cinema.Both newcomers and veteran directors made extraordinary movies, and some interesting trends have emerged.There have been a few watershed years in which Israeli directors produced an embarrassment of riches. The most notable of these was 2004, which saw the release of films such as Eytan Fox’s Walk on Water, Avi Nesher’s Turn Left at the End of the World, and Joseph Cedar’s Campfire. 2016 will likely be remembered as another such year.The most striking trend is the diversity of the filmmakers who are making their voices heard and, not coincidentally, the variety of stories told in their films. Culture Minister Miri Regev’s tirade about the lack of diversity in the Israeli film industry at the Ophir Awards in September was simply bizarre, in light of the fact that there had never been a group of winners and movies that reflected Israeli society more accurately. Jews, Muslims, Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, religious and secular, men and women, were all represented as never before.The Ophir Awards are the prizes of the Israel Academy of Film, and the Best Picture winner becomes Israel’s choice for consideration for a Best Foreign Film Oscar. This year’s winner, first-time director Elite Zexner’s Sand Storm, tells the story of a Beduin mother and daughter.Although Sand Storm did not make it to the Oscar shortlist, it’s still notable that this is the first time that a film completely in Arabic was Israel’s offering.Sand Storm is a meticulously crafted, beautifully acted and moving look at the usually mysterious world of Beduin.Zexner won the Best Director Ophir Award as well, and she is only the fourth woman to win this award in its 26-year history. Sand Storm, which has already been released around the world, also took the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.Two Israeli Arabs won important prizes, Tamer Nafar for Best Music for Udi Aloni’s Junction 48, about Palestinian rappers, and Ruba Blal, Best Supporting Actress for her performance as the mother in Sand Storm.Moris Cohen took the Best Actor prize for Meny Yaesh’s Our Father, for his performance as a Mizrahi bouncer in Tel Aviv, in a movie set in the world of the religious working class. Rama Burshtein, the ultra-Orthodox director who made a name for herself in 2012 with Fill the Void, won the Best Screenplay Ophir Award for her second feature film, Through the Wall, a comedy about an observant young woman who wants to get married fast. And although The Women’s Balcony didn’t win any Ophirs, this comedy about tensions between men and women in a religiously traditional working-class Jerusalem neighborhood shone a spotlight on just the kind of people Regev says have been shut out of the film industry.These filmmakers may not be the kind of artists whose work pleases the minister, but they are a far cry from the mostly male Ashkenazim who used to dominate the film industry here.WHILE, IN the past, there have been films from women and Israeli Arabs, this year the most surprising development is that two of the brightest new star directors are Palestinian women: Maha Haj and Maysaloun Hamoud.Haj’s Personal Affairs and Hamoud’s In Between (Bar Bahar) won the two top prizes at the Haifa International Film Festival in October. Both had their world premieres abroad, Personal Affairs at Cannes and In Between at the Toronto International Film Festival.The movies have not yet opened in theaters throughout Israel – Bar Bahar opens January 5 and Personal Affairs on January 26 – but they already have foreign distributors and will be opening soon in Europe and, most likely, the US.There have been many Palestinian films made in Israel over the years, but the vast majority have been made by male directors – notably Mohammad Bakri, Hany Abu-Assad and Elia Suleiman – and most put politics front and center. Haj and Hamoud have chosen a different path, to examine the political through the lens of the personal, and have succeeded brilliantly.Personal Affairs is a very engaging family story that, without being heavy-handed, creates a portrait of Palestinian society.Its focus is a depressed older couple, whose children have chosen very different lives, but who work together to cheer them up. The places these adult children call home illustrate different facets of the Palestinian experience: a son lives in Ramallah, a daughter is in Nazareth, and another son lives in Sweden.Almost all of the film explores characters’ rebellion and obedience to authority in the context of the family, while one stretch shows how easily the personal can become political in their world, as a woman jumps out of a car after a spat with her boyfriend near a checkpoint and the two are brought to a police station for questioning. The scene that follows is the climax of the movie, as inventive and beautifully filmed as everything that has gone before, and it says much more by avoiding political clichés. As the Cannes programmers wrote, “Between checkpoints and dreams, frivolity and politics, some want to leave, others want to stay, but all have personal affairs to resolve.”I was fortunate to see Maysaloun Hamoud pitch her film, In Between, at an event at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2015, and I was blown away by even that early glimpse of it, as were the judges, clearly. While it may not sound like it, to pitch a film in July 2015 and have it premiere (at Toronto) in September 2016 is lightning fast in the world of independent filmmaking. This director has such a fresh vision and engaging subject that I wasn’t surprised by the speed, though.The movie tells the story of three Arab roommates in Tel Aviv, one a traditional Muslim student, and two who are working and have a much freer life. There are many Arabs living in every Israeli city, but until now they have been under the radar in terms of Israeli movies. These women – a student, a criminal lawyer and a DJ – defy all stereotypes about Palestinians, especially Palestinian women.It’s an often funny, moving story of women who no longer fit in back home, and who struggle to build a feeling of community in Tel Aviv.In Between was co-produced by Shlomi Elkabetz, the writer/director who, with his late sister, Ronit Elkabetz, made the stunning trilogy of films about a wife from a Moroccan family who wants a divorce, To Take a Wife, Shiva and Gett.It marks the first collaboration I can remember between a major Jewish-Israeli filmmaker and an up-and-coming Palestinian director.It will be interesting to see whether Israeli audiences embrace these films as festival audiences here and abroad have.OTHER TRENDS this year include the continuation of the extraordinary success of Israeli movies worldwide. Many of us take this for granted now, but when I first started writing for The Jerusalem Post in 2000, if an Israeli movie was even accepted to an international festival, it was news. Now, if a festival closes without a prize for an Israeli movie, people ask me how this could have happened.The Audience Awards in both the documentary and feature-film Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival were won by Israeli films, the Heymann brothers’ Who’s Gonna Love Me Now?, a documentary about an Israeli with HIV and his relationship with his religious family, and Udi Aloni’s Junction 48, a look at the Palestinian rap scene.Asaph Polonsky’s One Week and a Day, a story of a family in mourning, had great success both abroad and at home, winning the Jerusalem Film Festival’s feature film award in a competitive year and the GAN Foundation Award at Cannes. Eitan Anner’s A Quiet Heart took the Grand Prix at the Tallinn Film Festival in Estonia, while Yaniv Berman’s Land of the Little People won the Best Director Prize at the Tbilisi Film Festival, and this list could go on.Almost all of these films have distribution deals for release abroad, and those that don’t yet will likely get them soon. This is important for the Israeli film industry, on two counts. On the one hand, it brings Israeli stories to foreign audiences. On the other, the money from foreign releases, while tiny by US standards, is significant for these low-budget films. If an Israeli movie makes a million dollars abroad, or more, this goes a long way in the Israeli movie industry.Speaking of money and the US, there is a certain amount of traffic between the Israeli film industry and Hollywood.Joseph Cedar, the American-born Israeli director whose previous two films, Beaufort and Footnote, were nominated for Oscars, has made an American movie starring Richard Gere, Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. The movie, which got mixed reviews at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, will be released here and in the US in March. There has been Oscar buzz for Gere, who plays an American Jew who ingratiates himself with an up-and-coming Israeli politician, played by Lior Ashkenazi.Directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado (Rabies, Big Bad Wolves) got the chance to direct a remake of Death Wish starring Bruce Willis and walked away over creative differences. Reportedly, they wanted to add some dark humor to the story. The consensus among the Hollywood press was that Keshales and Papushado are talented and will get another job soon.One director who went to Hollywood and came back more than a decade ago, Avi Nesher, continues to surpass himself.His latest film, Past Life, which premiered in Toronto and was just released here, the fact-based drama of two sisters in the Seventies delving into the family secrets, got some of the best reviews of his career. It has just received a distribution deal with Orion Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films, and will be released in the US in the spring.While it’s great that audiences abroad take such an interest in Israeli films now, a healthy film industry also features films that are best appreciated at home.For years, there were no Israeli movies that drew local audiences in any significant numbers, but that has changed.After directing popular comedies such as Kicking Out Shoshana and Ibiza, Shay Kanot was back this year with Four by Four, a kind of Israeli version of The Hangover, which was a big hit. The Last Band in Lebanon, another comedy, is about an Israeli musical group left behind in Lebanon after the withdrawal in 2000, and gets involved in a drug smuggling. It did well this year.The documentary and the shortfilm sectors of the film industry were extraordinary this year, and the prizes Israeli films in these categories won this year could fill another article.Israeli classics were digitally restored, among them Rafi Bukai’s Avanti Popolo, a comic antiwar story about Egyptian soldiers trapped in Israel at the end of the Six Day War, and Renen Schorr’s Late Summer Blues, the story of teens about to be drafted, both of which are celebrating their 30th anniversary. It was just announced that Avanti Popolo will be shown at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival.As the films completed in 2016 continue to be released through 2017, it seems likely that these movies will continue attracting large audiences both at home and abroad.