A feeling about filming

Three decades on, movie maker Doron Eran believes that cinema can change the way people think.

By BARRY DAVIS
Eran (left) with Gerard Depardieu and Menahem Golan at the Cannes Film Festival. (photo credit: Courtesy)
Eran (left) with Gerard Depardieu and Menahem Golan at the Cannes Film Festival.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Doron Eran has been in the business of helping others and raising awareness for some time now. Eran is not a social worker and doesn’t run some charity organization. He makes films – movies with a message.
The 59-year-old filmmaker recently marked three decades in the movie business as producer, scriptwriter and director, and clearly feels passionate about his profession.
Considering his impressive CV, which includes awards from festivals and prestigious cinematic outfits across the globe, it is surprising to hear that Eran did not set out to get into the industry.
“I got into movies by chance,” he says.
“I studied education and I worked with juvenile delinquents. When I was in the army, I worked with street gangs in Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh and Abu Ghosh.”
That was as part of the Raful Youth project created by then IDF chief of staff Rafael “Raful” Eitan, which set out to offer problematic youth a chance to reintegrate into society through a military framework.
Eran, clearly, did not end up working with marginal youth “by chance.”
“I think the person who sowed the seed in me of working in the field was my uncle,” he recalls. “He was responsible for restoring the areas of the Old City of Jaffa that had been destroyed [in the 1948 war], and I followed him around and saw all the youth there roaming the streets and through the rubble. I was very close to my uncle.
He lived in the same residential complex as us, and he’d bring all sorts of young people, sort of social outcasts, to his home. They looked a bit weird to me.”
Eran’s entry into the world of filmmaking came several years later. It was an unplanned career move.
“A bunch of friends of mine decided to set up a production company, and each one was supposed to take responsibility for a different area of the company in their specific field of expertise and interest,” he explains. “One wanted to translate comics into French and market them, and another wanted to be a movie director.”
At the time, Eran had designs on an entirely different area of professional pursuit.
“I thought about establishing a PR company for politicians. Back then, there was nothing like that around,” he says.
Fate had other things in store for him.
“I joined up with my pal who wanted to make a documentary about his own childhood at a boarding school, and I got involved in fund-raising for the movie. It went quite easily, and I raised the $300,000 he needed for the film. That was a lot of money 30 years ago,” he notes.
Things took off from there. Eran found himself filling the producer’s role for the documentary, despite the fact that he had no relevant previous experience.
“I just sort of fell into it,” he says. “I learned as I went along.”
Eran and his friend did a good job and put together a talented cast, which included Smadar Kilchinski, Alon Abutboul and Shmuel Vilozny, who went on to become leading lights of the Israeli thespian community.
“It was a smash hit, although the next movie was a financial flop,” he says, adding that the critics liked it. “It was an artistic film and was screened at a festival in Berlin, but we didn’t make any money out of it.”
Even so, the movie got Eran’s name out there into the European arena, and he scaled a steep learning curve as he made his way ever deeper into the business.
“When I started out, the Israeli film industry was not very big, and each movie had to make its own way. Today, there is the New Fund for Cinema and TV (NFCT), and movies are made here with financial assistance. Back then there was no official funding for movies,” he says.
Failure of the sophomore venture notwithstanding, Eran was up and running as a bona fide member of the movie-making fraternity.
“That’s how I became a producer. I have made over 60 movies, for cinema and television, and series and documentaries,” he says.
ERAN IS obviously adept at learning the ropes on his own, and he eventually slipped into the director’s seat.
“I’d watched various directors at work, and after about 10 or 12 movies [as producer], I decided to direct a film,” he states simply. “Actually, I made the decision to direct a film because I wanted to get a better idea of what the job entailed.”
By all accounts, the 1986 directorial debut went well. The movie was called Flash, starring Nitza Shaul and Amos Lavi, and was screened at the Valencia Film Festival.
“I wanted to understand what a director goes through when he makes a film,” he says.
It seems it was a sobering discovery.
“I realized that, at best, there are 30 or 40 people on the set just waiting for the director to slip up. I had a feeling of being on my own, of all those people just waiting for me to make the wrong choice. However, ultimately, it is a fascinating experience. And anyway, when I direct a film I make a movie on a topic that is close to my heart. In the last 10 to 15 years, I have primarily addressed subjects that relate to burning social issues,” he says.
Eran went straight to the top in order to hone in on areas he felt needed to be brought to the public’s attention. He contacted the Prime Minister’s Office and spoke to various officials, including then PMO director-general Avigdor Liberman, and people responsible for matters relating to juvenile delinquency, substance abuse and other social problems.
“I produced films about drug abuse in families, I produced Menat Yeter (Overdose) [in 1993, which won a prize at the Beijing Film Festival], and there was Layla Lavan (White Night) [about a prison inmate’s struggle to beat drug addiction],” he enumerates.
The latter won the Young Lions award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995.
Other notable Eran projects include a stirring and incisive documentary about late Israeli-Palestinian actor and theater director Julian Mer-Khamis, who was killed by Palestinian militants outside his Freedom Theater in Jenin; and Tahara, in 2002, which addresses the topic of female genital mutilation in Islamic society.
Eran also worked at the side of internationally acclaimed film director and producer Menahem Golan. His 2010 documentary about Golan, Director’s Cut, was made in cooperation with Channel 1. And true to his boat-pushing ethos, in 2011 he directed Melting Away, which was the first Israeli film to address the subject of how parents deal with their child’s desire to undergo a sex-change operation. The scriptwriter for Melting Away was Eran’s partner and mother of his 10-month-old daughter Billy Ben-Moshe. Eran also has three adult children from his first marriage, who are fellow movie industry professionals.
“I love Israeli cinema, and I believe in it,” states Eran. “It may sound a bit clichéd, but I truly believe that cinema has the ability to change the way people think and behave. I believe that after they watch a movie, there is a strong likelihood that people will think and act differently.”
The proof of the pudding, says Eran, has already been digested.
“After a screening of Melting Away, I got a phone call from someone who said he was a transgender and that he and his parents had never talked about it, but that they started discussing it openly after seeing the movie.
That is very gratifying for me,” says Eran.