Fifty new Israeli films and two television series will premiere at the 38th Haifa International Film Festival, which will take place October 8-17, and will include an extensive international program as well.
The Israeli Feature Film Competition, where many recent Ophir Award winners have premiered, will include seven films. Maor Zaguri, who is best known for his television series Zaguri Empire, has written and directed the coming-of-age drama Virgins about a teen in the Arava, which stars Maor Levy and Chen Amsalem.
Veteran director Dan Wolman’s latest film, Judas, will be shown. It is an adaptation of Amos Oz’s novel of the same name, about a student in 1950s Jerusalem taking care of an elderly man, and it stars Yuval Livni and Doron Tavory.
Eitan Anner’s The Good Person stars Moran Rosenblatt (Fauda) as a movie producer working with a rabbi who sounds much like Uri Zohar.
Leon Prudovsky’s My Neighbor Adolf tells the story of a lonely, grumpy Holocaust survivor in Latin America who becomes convinced that his neighbor is actually Hitler. Udo Kier, who has played similar parts in the past, portrays the man who may be the Fuhrer in hiding. Prudovsky made the engaging rom-com Five Hours from Paris.
Gudis Schneider’s The Fat Guy looks at two police officers who work together for a decade before they fall in love.
Erez Tadmor’s Children of Nobody tells the story of troubled boys who band together to save the shelter for at-risk youth that has kept them off the streets, and stars Roy Assaf.
Michal Winik’s Valeria is Getting Married will have its world premiere in Venice this month, and will then be shown at Haifa. It’s about a Ukrainian woman who comes to Israel planning to be a mail-order bride like her sister, but finds herself reconsidering this decision.
Eight documentaries will take part in the Israeli documentary competition, and they look at diverse subjects. We Will Never Say Goodbye is a portrait of the late comic actor Yehuda Barkan, by Alon Gur Arye (Mossad). Fig Tree director Alamork Davidian’s Honey Trap is about how the Ethiopian community in Rehovot faces the threat of being displaced by an upscale construction project. Uri Barbash’s Nitza’s Choice is about a Holocaust survivor’s journey of self-discovery.
What else debuts at the Haifa International Film Festival?
The television series Who Has Heard of Hana and Nava? by Noa Erenberg and Galit Hoogi, the creators of Sisters, is about two old friends who served in a military band in the 1970s, and stars Keren Mor and Hana Laslo. The Mandate is a miniseries about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began during the British Mandate period.
Special screenings at the festival will include Dror Moreh’s latest film, The Corridors of Power, which examines how the US has responded to genocide and human rights abuses around the world in the post-Soviet era. Moreh made the Oscar-nominated film The Gatekeepers.
Other special events will include a tribute to the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University and a screening of a restored version of Renen Schorr’s documentary Wedding in Jerusalem, about the marriage between one of Uri Zohar’s sons and one of Arik Einstein’s daughters.
