There are an enormous number of festivals starting up soon, both in Israel and abroad, and, as usual in recent years, Israeli films will have a strong presence.
By HANNAH BROWNwoody allen 88(photo credit: )
There are an enormous number of festivals starting up soon, both in Israel and abroad, and, as usual in recent years, Israeli films will have a strong presence.
The 24th Haifa International Film Festival doesn't start until October 14 (and runs for a week), but it's starting off on the right foot, with Woody Allen's charming comedy of manners, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The film stars Woody's regular muse, Scarlett Johansson, as a naïve, young American woman in Spain who gets involved with a scarily attractive artist (Javier Bardem, who last played a scarily unattractive serial killer in No Country for Old Men) and his ex-wife (Penelope Cruz, who does her best acting ever in English). In recent years, the festival kicked off with much heavier fare, so Allen's Vicky /iwill send people off opening night in an appropriate mood to party.
There was grumbling at the Jerusalem Film Festival this summer because only four Israeli feature films were in competition. Organizers said that several filmmakers just hadn't gotten their movies ready in time, so we'll see whether this category is more competitive in Haifa this year. Announcements will be coming soon.
The Toronto International Film Festival just got underway yesterday and there are eight films that are to a greater or lesser degree Israeli in the line-up. It's getting harder all the time to say what country a particular film is from. For example, Amos Gitai may be the best known Israeli director in the world, but his latest film, Plus tard, tu comprendras, is listed as a French/German co-production. It stars Jeanne Moreau as a French woman who has hidden her family's struggles during the Holocaust from her adult children, and takes place in France. There is no ambiguity about the nationality of Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, his animated documentary about the Lebanon War, which will also be shown. Several other Israeli documentaries will be screened, including the powerful movie, The Heart of Jenin, a documentary about a Palestinian family that decides to donate their son's organs when he is killed by IDF.
Two years ago, actor Jeff Goldblum and director Paul Schrader gave a press conference in Jerusalem to announce that they would be filming an adaptation of Yoram Kaniuk's novel, Adam Resurrected, part of which would be shot in Israel. The completed film will be premiering in Toronto (and will also be shown at the Telluride Film Festival). I won't attempt to summarize its magic realist plot, but it deals with a clown who survives the Holocaust and co-stars Ayelet Zurer, Willem Dafoe, Jenya Dodina, Idan Alterman, Hanna Laszlo, Hanna Meron and Derek Jacobi.
Another unusual film that will be making waves soon on the international festival circuit is Dani Rosenberg's Homeland. The short drama was his final project for the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem, and it stars Itay Turan (Beaufort) as a Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivor sent to fight in the War of Independence, and Miki Leon as the commander who tries to make him into a sabra. It is showing this month at cinematheques around the country.
The Fifth International Women's Film Festival in Rehovot will run this year from September 15-21 and features a much larger selection than in previous years. In the past, I've felt that festivals such as this one have a tendency to ghetto-ize the very films and filmmakers they try to champion. But, as this year's well-designed catalog informs me, only 5 percent of directors of feature films are female, so I'm willing to put my reservations aside, as well as my strong feeling that a women's film festival that spotlights a special program about food and eating disorders, as this one does, runs the a risk of trivializing the whole enterprise. More intriguing by far are the programs featuring movies by Iranian women filmmakers (which includes the animated memoir Persepolis). There are also recent films by Israeli directors, including Ada Ushpiz's Desert Brides, about polygamy among the Bedouin; Tamar Yotam's To See If I'm Smiling, about women soldiers, which won the Best Documentary Award at the Haifa Film Festival last year; and Natalie Assouline's Brides of Allah, about female would-be suicide bombers in Israeli jails.
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