Let the credits roll

At 30, the Jerusalem Film Festival boasts an impressive guest list.

By HANNAH BROWN
Roberto Benigni and Lia van Leer521 (photo credit: (Courtesy Jerusalem Cinematheque))
Roberto Benigni and Lia van Leer521
(photo credit: (Courtesy Jerusalem Cinematheque))
Ask Lia van Leer, the founding director of the Jerusalem Film Festival (and the Jerusalem Cinematheque, where it takes place), how she feels about celebrating the festival’s 30th anniversary this year, and she smiles.
“It’s going to be a great festival this year,” she says.
“We’re having such wonderful guests. Really, it will be very good.”
But what about the 30-year anniversary? “We’ve had so many great festivals, really wonderful movies,” she says at a recent critics’ preview screening, and then excuses herself to attend to a few details of the upcoming festivities.
Van Leer, it seems, is too focused on the festival at hand to have much time to reminisce about festivals past.
The annual Jerusalem Film Festival – which begins on July 4 this year and runs until runs until July 13 at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and other venues around the city – is a tremendous undertaking. It opens each year with a festive screening at the Sultan’s Pool Amphitheater – this time, the movie will be Reshef Levi’s comic caper, Hunting Elephants – preceded by music, awards, speeches, and fireworks. The 10-day festival includes 200 films from 45 countries, plus dozens of special events for audiences and students.
While we’ve all become used to the posters and banners for the festival every summer around the city, some might not realize that in the early ’80s, the idea of having a huge film festival here seemed crazy to many people – but not to van Leer.
Having immigrated to Israel from Romania in 1940, she started a cinema club with her late husband, Dutch-born industrialist Wim van Leer, at their Haifa home in the ’50s, which eventually gave her the idea of founding the Haifa and Jerusalem Cinematheques.
“And once we had the Jerusalem Cinematheque, I knew there should be a festival. To bring filmmakers from around the world to show their work, and to show off the talented filmmakers we have here,” she says.
“She had a strong vision, she convinced everyone,” says Avinoam Harpak, the director of the festival, who has been with van Leer since the beginning. Among those she convinced were late Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek and a host of foundations and donors who helped bring her vision to life.
The first festival, in 1984, opened with Ettore Scola’s appropriately festive Le Bal. And a partial guest list from that year includes three iconic names: Lillian Gish, a star from the days of the silents who was still acting in her 90s; Jeanne Moreau, the acclaimed French actress who starred in Francois Truffaut’s masterpiece Jules and Jim, among other films; and Warren Beatty, the Hollywood ladies’ man.
Lots of people at the Cinematheque claim to have a few good Beatty stories, but none of them will go on the record.
“There was some competition between Gish and Moreau for attention,” recalls Harpak. “And Lia had put them up in Mishkenot Sha’ananim [the guesthouse for artists next to the Cinematheque].
But Moreau wanted a hairdresser sent to her room, room service, a manicure – she wanted to be a star.”
Moreau was promptly moved to a fancy hotel, where she could be pampered in the style to which she had become accustomed.
It was fortuitous that the Jerusalem Film Festival staff got experience in dealing with movie stars that first year, because van Leer convinced many of the top actors from Hollywood and Europe to come to subsequent festivals. A partial list of those stars consists of Robert De Niro, Marcello Mastroianni, Fanny Ardant, Jane Birkin, Jane Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Bob Hoskins, John Malkovich, Delphine Seyrig, Liv Ullmann, Jeff Goldblum and Peter Ustinov.
Informally, many more stars have dropped by. Natalie Portman strolled into the press area in 2008 to have coffee and chat with Dieter Kosslick, the director of the Berlin Film Festival, who was a guest.
BUT PERHAPS even more impressive is the list of directors, writers and producers who have taken part, including Scola, Ang Lee, Emir Kusturica, Anthony Minghella, the Taviani brothers, Mike Leigh (who would later boycott a conference held at the capital’s Sam Spiegel Film School), Krzysztof Kielowski, Roger Corman, David Mamet, Elia Suleiman, Chantal Akerman, Roberto Benigni, the Dardenne brothers, Terrence Malick, Claude Lelouch, Nanni Moretti, Hany Abu Assad, Dusan Makavejev, Deepa Mehta, Chen Kaige, Roman Polanski, Rashid Mashrawi, Bertrand Tavernier, Krzysztof Zanussi, Michael Winterbottom, John Schlesinger and Wim Wenders.
“We also helped bring attention to many beginning filmmakers who went on to great things,” says Harpak. “We brought their first or second film to the festival.”
One of these films by a fledgling director was Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, which Harpak saw at the London Film Festival and brought to Jerusalem. Other directors who can count Jerusalem as one of the first international film festivals in which their films were shown include Susanne Bier, Atom Egoyan, Darren Aronofsky, Michael Haneke, Wong Kar Wai, Tsai Mingliang, John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, Stephen Frears, Spike Lee, Neil Jordan, John Lasseter and Lena Dunham.
The festival brought works by these directors to Israel long before most of them were being distributed internationally, and a generation of Israeli filmmakers has grown up on films they saw at this festival.
“We’ve had so many filmmakers show their student films and their short films at the festival, and then come back and show longer works,” notes Harpak, adding that the student film competition, which is shown at the festival in three parts, is especially strong this year.
The festival has always given out awards for Best Israeli Feature, Best Israeli Documentary, and Best Israeli Short Film, once called the Wolgin Awards (the awards for features are now known as the Haggiag Family Awards, while the documentary awards are called the Van Leer Awards).
There are also various awards for films in the “Jewish Experience” category, and the Pirchi Awards for Best First or Second Israeli Feature. The In the Spirit of Freedom Awards, in memory of van Leer’s late husband, honor filmmakers whose movies deal with human rights issues, and there is an award for Israeli high school students’ films in his name as well. However, unlike at most large film festivals, there is no award for the best international feature.
“Lia wanted to focus on the Israeli filmmakers,” says Harpak. “She wanted to give a boost to the local industry, and to also emphasize human rights, with the In the Spirit of Freedom Award.”
There is no question that the festival has succeeded in buoying the local film industry. It’s all there in the festival programs.
Joseph Cedar’s second film, Campfire, was shown at the festival in 2004, and his next two, Beaufort and Footnote, were nominated for Oscars. Similarly, Ari Folman’s 2001 movie Made in Israel was at the festival, and his next movie was the Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe-winning Waltz with Bashir. The Oscar-nominated Ajami, directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, premiered at the festival in 2009, as did Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon, which went on to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Dover Kosashvilli, Nir Bergman, Eran Kolirin, Dror Shaul, Nadav Lapid, Eytan Fox and many others showed their early work at the festival and went on to worldwide success.
A parallel transformation has taken place in the documentary realm. Last year, for example, two of the five nominees for the Best Documentary Oscar, Emad Burnat’s and Guy Davidi’s 5 Broken Cameras and Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers, were shown first at the festival in 2012.
AS THE critics’ preview program ends, van Leer is still busy, heading down to the lawn, where the staff is setting up for an evening of films aimed at teens and students. She chats about the program, and even samples some of the popcorn. She agrees to reminisce a bit, but is soon drawn away to attend to the evening’s program.
She is always focused on the task at hand, and happiest when she is surrounded by the often young audiences that frequent the Cinematheque.
I first sat down for a long interview with her just before the opening of the 19th festival, in 2002, when the second intifada was at its height, but what she said then rings just as true today: “We have to go on. I feel the films this year will not be only an escape for people, but also maybe a way of helping them understand things better. That’s what I hope.”