The winners in the 12th DocAviv Film Festival were announced in a ceremony on Tuesday night. The festival, which is devoted to documentary filmmaking from Israel and around the world, is held at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. The winner of the Israeli Competition was Ofir Trainin’s Wandering Eyes, which is about Gavriel Balahsan, a musician from the south of Israel whose band, Alji, broke up when he became mentally ill. The winner in the International Competition was Steam of Life, a series of interviews with men in saunas all across Finland, by Joonas Berghäll and Mika Hotakainen. Document of Identity, by Maytal Ben Hamo, about the Israel-born child of workers from Ghana, was the winner in the Student Films category. The festival runs through May 15 and dozens of movies are still to be screened for the public, including The Desert of Forbidden Art, which will be shown on May 14 and 15 in the presence of its directors, Tchavdar Georgiev and Amanda Pope. The film tells the story of an art collector in Uzbekistan who amassed a collection of more than 40,000 works of art considered subversive the by the Soviet government.For more information, go to the festival Website at docaviv.co.il.
