Haifa International Film Festival also gets in on the act

Some 77 Israeli films will take part in the festival, 72 of which will be premieres. NIS 1 million in new post-production grants will be awarded to Israeli filmmakers.

By HANNAH BROWN
SHARON BAR ZIV’S ‘Good Morning Son.’ (photo credit: ZIV BERKOVICH)
SHARON BAR ZIV’S ‘Good Morning Son.’
(photo credit: ZIV BERKOVICH)
Israeli films will be front and center at the 34th Haifa International Film Festival, which will take place at the Haifa Cinematheque and other theaters from September 22 to October 1.
Some 77 Israeli films will take part in the festival, 72 of which will be premieres. NIS 1 million in new post-production grants will be awarded to Israeli filmmakers in the pitching events, the Cinemarket and feature film competitions, awarded by BCL Finance Group, USA.
The seven Israeli movies in the feature-film competition will be premieres. Perhaps the most anticipated of these will be Alamork Davidian’s Fig Tree. It’s a semi-autobiographical film, set in Ethiopia, about a teenage girl struggling to live a normal life during the civil war in the late 80s and making the transition to life in Israel. This film’s screenplay took the top prize at the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab in 2014.
Sharon Bar Ziv’s Good Morning Son is about an injured soldier and his family and friends’ attempts to help him heal. Joseph El-Dror’s No Blood tells the story of a writing teacher trying to hide secrets in his past. Yaron Shani’s Love Trilogy: Stripped looks at a tormented writer and the bond she forms with a teenage neighbor. Shani co-directed the Oscar-nominated Ajami.
Daniel Wachsmann’s Acre Dreams is about a Palestinian theater director who directs an autobiographical play set in 1947. Marco Carmel’s Noble Savage looks at a teen boy with an eating disorder whose parents are former junkies.
Tel Aviv on Fire by Sameh Zoabi tells the story of a production assistant on a soap opera in Ramallah who gets promoted to head writer, but needs the help of an IDF officer to complete his scripts.
Ran Slavin’s Call for Dreams, which will be shown out of competition, is set in Tokyo and tells the story of a woman who places a newspaper ad asking strangers to share their dreams with her, and through a complex chain of events, an Israeli detective investigating crime in Tel Aviv is drawn into her project.
Seven new documentaries will be shown in the Israeli documentary competition, among them the latest film by the mother-daughter team Anat Yuta Zuria and Shira Clara Winther, Reinvestigation, about an ultra-Orthodox woman who pursues deadbeat dads, and Neta Ariel’s A Mirror for the Sun, the story of an observant young woman who goes trekking in Nepal and must fight for survival during a snow storm.
Uri Barbash’s 1989 film, One of Us, will be screened in a restored version as a tribute to the film’s late producer, Zvi Spielmann.
There will also be a memorial program honoring the late film editor Era Lapid.