How Israeli filmmakers are managing to work during the coronavirus crisis

While hundreds of thousands of entertainment-industry workers have been badly hurt by the novel coronavirus crisis’s impact on film and television here, a lucky few have found employment.

By HANNAH BROWN
Film camera (illustrative) (photo credit: ING IMAGE/ASAP)
Film camera (illustrative)
(photo credit: ING IMAGE/ASAP)
It’s never easy to make movies or television shows in Israel, but this year, the difficulties have skyrocketed.
While hundreds of thousands of entertainment-industry workers, most of whom are independent, have been badly hurt by the novel coronavirus crisis’s impact on film and television here, a lucky few have found employment on a handful of productions that have gone forward during the outbreak.
A number of children’s and tween series have managed to pick up where they left off when the lockdown forced them to put away their cameras, and fans have a voracious appetite for these series. Like the majority of those approached for this article, crew members declined to speak for attribution about these series, perhaps afraid of drawing too much attention and ultimately getting shut down again.
Said one television insider, “Of course, the actors have to take off their masks to do scenes. You can’t do dialogue with a mask on! Look at the news broadcasts, even Prof. [Gabriel] Barbash [an expert who is a frequent commentator on Channel 12] doesn’t wear a mask when he is interviewed. But people are scared. It’s always hard to make a living in this industry in Israel and there’s a feeling that if Health Ministry inspectors were to look closely at the set, they’d find some excuse, and we’d all be back to trying to get unemployment, which most of us aren’t even entitled to.”
In an odd turn of events, there are currently dueling television series in production about Eti Alon, the Trade Bank employee who embezzled hundreds of millions of shekels to pay her brother’s debts in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It echoes the so-called “Long Island Lolita” attempted murder case in the US in the 90s, where three movies about Amy Fisher were made in 1992 and 1993. Perhaps the fact that the Alon case is a straightforward story, with no huge crowd scenes or special effects needed, helped make it attractive to film in the coronavirus era.
If this were any other time, there would have been big headlines in the Israeli press about the fact that two of Israel’s biggest television producers, Keshet and Yes, have both chosen to film Alon’s story now. But both productions have kept a relatively low profile.
Keshet’s Alon series stars Chen Amsalem of Zaguri, and recently finished filming in Holon. Photos taken on the set and published in the newspaper, Ha Shikma Holon, show the crew wearing masks. Partly because there are so few productions that have managed to film during the coronavirus crisis ,and partly because Amsalem is such a well-liked star, the production got a lot of press attention. Much of it focused on whether the brunette Amsalem wore a wig or dyed her hair blond for the role, but a photo on her Instagram account seems to have cleared up the mystery and proven that she dyed her long locks. Tsahi Halevi (Fauda, Mossad!) co-stars.
Amsalem may qualify as the hardest-working Israeli actress during the coronavirus period, since she also stars in Kobi Machat’s Full Speed, a sequel to the teen-motorcycle flick, Full Gas, which came out last year. Full Speed, which had mostly outdoor scenes  in the desert to complete before the coronavirus lockdown, managed to finish filming and is now in post-production. This would have been one of the big, perhaps the biggest, Israeli summer movies, had this been a normal year. Now, producers are weighing whether to delay its release for a year or to put it in theaters as soon as they are up and running again – whenever that is.
Dana Ivgy, another dark-haired actress who has gone blond, is playing Alon in Yes’s version of her story, which is currently shooting in Tel Aviv and will be filming for a few more weeks. A source familiar with the production said that filmmakers are being “super careful” to obey all Health Ministry regulations. They have turned an abandoned branch of Bank Mizrahi Tefahot on Ben Yehuda Boulevard into a replica of the now-defunct Trade Bank, complete with 90s-era desktop computers. Neighborhood residents, who typically grouse about the inconvenience of having a production filmed on their streets, have welcomed the cast and crew with open arms, embracing it as a return to normalcy amid the crisis.
So Israeli television viewers will get their pick of Eti Alon series in the coming year, but what else is in the pipeline? The film funds in Israel, governmental and privately run funds that give money to filmmakers’ budgets, have been flooded with requests to fund script development during the crisis, since many screenwriters have been home with lots of time to write. There are more than a dozen Israeli films that are almost done and could be released soon, if there were any place to release them. Some are already in post-production, meaning they have been shot and just need some final polish involving soundtrack and editing, while others need money to film a few additional scenes. But currently they are all stuck and won’t be completed or released anytime soon.
If there were a prize for the audacity of hope during the coronavirus era, it would go to veteran director Avi Nesher, who is deep in pre-production on an ambitious and complex period movie, Portrait of Victory.
The film, which looks at both Jewish and Egyptian perspectives on the War of Independence, stars Joy Rieger (who appeared in Nesher’s previous two films, Past Life and The Other Story), Meshi Kleinstein, Ala Dakka (the breakout star of the third season of Fauda) and Amir Khoury. It is set in Cairo (those scenes will be filmed in Israel), as well as in an Arab village and an Israeli kibbutz near the Egyptian border.
“At first we recorded the score, we recorded some incredible big-band music and the end-credit music,” Nesher said. But once the recording was done, he had a choice: to put the movie on hold until the crisis ends or to go full-speed ahead.
Nesher chose the latter option. “We’re like a small plane moving into the storm,” he said. “Our producers are acting heroically, [producer] Ehud Bleiberg is extraordinarily committed to this project, which has a big cast and a large budget.”
Currently, the cast is in rehearsals, which Nesher emphasized are carried out according to Health Ministry restrictions, with very few people in a room together at any one time.
While he is careful about the regulations, “We’re not going to skip any steps,” he said. Known for his attention to detail, Nesher is making sure that his cast speaks “perfect Hebrew or Arabic of the period,” and getting them lessons in how to do 1940s dances.
“It really is bumpy,” he admitted. “It’s so good that people have come together, putting art before everything. People have taken pay cuts, and we’re going to have to all be locked up together in a hotel in Beersheba when shooting starts... We do the work as if there’s no danger and I tell myself, ‘Today we did good work, yesterday we did good work and tomorrow we’ll do good work.’ It’s really an against-all-odds production.”