Israeli Film Festival 2012: Preview

Israeli cinema is enjoying a boom at home and internationally, generating a sense of excitement and optimism among the organisers of the 2012 AICE Israeli Film Festival which this year is expanding nationally from its Sydney/Melbourne base.

For a small country which produces on average of 20 feature films annually, Israel filmmakers are celebrating the exposure they’ll receive at two major upcoming festivals. An unprecedented six Israeli films will unspool at the Venice Film Festival and there will be seven at the larger Toronto International Film Festival. 

In the home market, national films are regularly commanding a 10 per cent–12 per cent share of the box office, a level of popularity which Australian filmmakers would kill for here, where 4 per cent is the norm.

All of which enthuses Katriel Schory, who has the dual roles of artistic director of the AICE festival and executive director of the Israel Film Fund, a counterpart to Screen Australia except the Israeli agency doesn’t support documentaries or TV series. 

“There is a tremendous creative energy in the Israeli film industry, an explosion of talent and energy,” the Israel-based Schory told SBS Film.

“Israeli cinema has gone through a tremendous decade in which we managed to completely turnaround cinema into one of the most popular art forms and get people back into the cinema.”

This year’s festival, which launches at the Palace Verona in Sydney on August 15, will showcase, he says, “the wide range of the different faces of this country. We will look again at this turbulent, multicultural society.”

The event is expanding to Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide for the first time with the support of Palace Cinemas. “There’s been a growing interest in Australia in Israeli cinema,” he says. “We’ve seen good audiences in Melbourne and Sydney each year. We have a very good relationship between Screen Australia and the Israel Film Fund. We thought the time had come to enhance the relations and Palace is happy to take the festival into other cities. Israeli producers are very happy with the arrangement, the deal. It didn’t add that much money [to the budget]. We hope it’s going to work.”

Schory won’t be attending this year’s edition but he’s delighted to be sending Russian-born, Israeli actress Evgenia Dodina as the festival’s guest. She stars in Michal Aviad’s Invisible, based on the true story of a TV editor who is forced to revisit her past when she was one of 16 victims of a man dubbed as the Polite Rapist.

The opening night film is Yossi Madmoni's Restoration, the saga of a man who must face a few home truths after his business partner of 40 years dies while having sex with a prostitute.

Jonathan Sagall’s Lipstikka (pictured), a drama about two Palestinian women in London and their encounter when they were teenagers with two young Israeli soldiers, caused a controversy when it screened in Israel. 

Marco Carmel’s My Lovely Sister is a melodrama-comedy about reconciliation beyond the grave, blending Sephardic superstition and magical-realist touches. Its star Evelin HaGoel won best actress and Reymond Amsalem best supporting actress at the Israeli Film
Academy Awards.

Sharon Bar-Ziv’s Room 514 focuses on a young female military investigator who seeks to find the truth about an officer accused of abusing Palestinian civilians. One of four or five micro-budgeted films backed each year by Schory’s fund, it was shot in one room in five days for a mere $US90,000.

First-time director-writer Alon Zingman’s drama Dusk revolves around the intercutting stories of an airport duty-free clerk tracking down her birth mother, a sexy Argentine émigré who inveigles a troubled doctor into circumcising her nine-year-old son, and a traveller whose father is involved in a hit-and-run accident.

Yasmine Novak’s The Love Lost Diaries looks at a Holocaust survivor who, after the death of her husband, is persuaded by her daughter to read the WWII diary of her former lover 65 years after it was written.

The documentary program includes Dolphin Boy, the chronicle of a teenager in an Arab village in northern Israel who is savagely beaten and traumatised, and subsequently rehabilitated by a psychiatrist who innovatively uses dolphin therapy.

Meni Elias’ When Israel Went Out retraces the trek undertaken by thousands of Falasha Jews who set out to walk 200km from Ethiopia to Israel in the 1980s, and is dedicated to those who did not survive the journey.

The Israel Film Fund finances 12-14 films per year, a hard selection process for Schory who receives more than 200 fully-developed scripts annually. A few other films are financed by the Jerusalem Film and Television Fund and by the country’s broadcasters which are obliged to invest in national films. There are no tax incentives but one third of the Israel Film Fund’s projects are international co-productions, chiefly with France and Germany.

Only one Australian-Israel co-production has been made under their bilateral agreement: Tatia Rosenthal’s 2008 stop-motion animated drama $9.99. Schory says several projects are in the works but none has yet materialised.

He strives to be objective when he programs the festival, selecting four or five titles this year that were not backed by his fund. Each year he also organises the Australian Film Festival in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem in June and July. The last edition featured 10 Australian features and docos including Wish You Were Here, The Tall Man, Toomelah, Snowtown and Careless Love.


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