Israeli films to premiere at Jerusalem Film Festival
One million shekels in cash prizes will be awarded in various competitions at the festival.
By HANNAH BROWN‘CREAM AND CHERRIES’ will be one of the Israeli films in competition at the 36th Jerusalem Film Festival.(photo credit: GUY RAZ)
The 36th Jerusalem Film Festival has just released a list of the films that will take part in the Israeli competitions.The festival will be held from July 25 to August 4 at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and other venues around the city. One million shekels in cash prizes will be awarded in various competitions at the festival.Thanks to its first collaboration with the Gesher Multicultural Film Fund, this year will include a new event, the short film day, which as the name suggests, will celebrate short films. It will be held alongside the festival’s short-film competition and will feature a Pitch Point film-promotion event that will include a prize of NIS 250,000 for the proposal for the best short film. In addition, professional events and screenings of short films from around the world will be held.There will be a festive screening of the Israeli premiere of a restored copy of the late Amos Guttman’s film Bar 51. Guttman, one of the most important filmmakers of his generation in Israel, died of AIDS in 1993. The digitally restored version of the film was created as part of an initiative of the Israel Film Archive at the Jerusalem Cinematheque to preserve great cinematic works and make them accessible to the public.There will also be a tribute to the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School on its 30th anniversary.The Haggiag Competition for Best Israeli Feature Film will include two movies that had their international premieres in Berlin: part two of Yaron Shani’s Love Trilogy, Chained, about the increasingly difficult life of a policeman, and Nimrod Eldar’s The Day After I’m Gone, about a middle-aged father (Menashe Noy) coping with his suicidal teenage daughter.Born in Jerusalem and Still Alive, by Yossi Atia and David Ofek, is a fact-based black comedy about a young man’s attempt to rid himself of anxiety attacks by guiding tours of sites of terrorist attacks in Jerusalem.Limor Shmila’s That’s the Way You Love tells the story of a woman who finds that having a baby takes its toll on her relationship with her husband.Gur Bentwich wrote, directed and stars in Cream and Cherries, the story of a movie director’s existential crisis.Ram Loevy’s The Dead of Jaffa looks at three children who are smuggled from the West Bank to the home of a British family in Jaffa after their father is imprisoned.God of the Piano, the first feature film by Itay Tal, is about a woman who comes from a family of classical musicians and gives birth to a deaf child.Among the documentaries will be a film that focuses on politician Avigdor Liberman, and one about singer/actor Yossi Banai.Tickets to some events at festival, which will open with the Korean film Parasite, are on sale at jff.org.il. The rest will be available soon.
