The Jerusalem Film Festival will celebrate its 30th anniversary this summer! Opening ceremonies will take place on July 4, 2013, at the Sultan’s Pool in Jerusalem, honoring the festival’s central role in fostering Israeli cinema. On this auspicious occasion, the festival will open with an Israeli film, the premiere of Reshef Levi’s Hunting Elephants.
Hunting Elephants, produced by Ehud Bleiberg, Moshe Edery and Leon Edery, boasts a a bevy of Israeli stars -Sasson Gabai, Moni Moshonov, Yael Abecassis, Moshe Ivgy, Tzvika Hadar, and international star of Star Trek and X Men …

CoPro 16 – The Israel Documentary Screen Market, will take place from May 26 – June 2, 2013. 60 international film and television industry members will arrive in Israel for the annual event, a unique independent marketing channel for documentary filmmakers, founded and directed by Orna Yarmut. Now in its 15th edition, CoPro events will take place in Hangar 11 at the Port of Tel Aviv, the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, and the Arab-Hebrew Theatre in Jaffa.
Simon Chinn, producer of the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugarman and Man on a Wire, …

The process of immigration to Israel – of Jewish immigration to Israel, to be precise – is described in English as Absorption; in Hebrew, it is merely reception. It is easy to assume that this is merely a matter of semantics, but after watching the candid House of Fun, one may very well think otherwise.
Screened in the Israeli Competition at the just-ended DocAviv, the Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival, House of Fun (the Hebrew title, נפלא פה, “wonderful here,” taken from the film’s theme song by Habiluim, has more …

Director Ari Folman and the creative team of The Congress will be making their way to Cannes, where the film will open the prestigious Director’s Fortnight. Going to Cannes with Folman are: producer Eitan Manzuri, production manager Shirly Herman, animation director Yoni Goodman, art director David Polonsky, editor Nili Feller, visual & effects artist Roy Nitzan, soundtrack designer Aviv Aldema, and actors Robin Wright and Danny Houston.
The schedule for Cannes will be:
Thursday, May 16th
9:00 Press screening of The Congress at Theatre Croisette (50 La Croisette), followed by a Q & …

Indian Film Panorama comes to the Tel Aviv Cinematheque from May 13 – 18, 2013. Offering a view of the colorful, moving films of different times and genres, the film week is part of the Celebrating India in Israel Festival presented by the Embassy of India, and produced by Teamwork Productions.
The Full Program:
Pardes (India, 1997, 191 min, Hindi with Hebrew subtitles)
Director: Shubhash Ghai; Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Mahima Chaudry, Amrish Puri
Ganga marries the son of a wealthy Indian man who now lives in Los Angeles. When her husband’s dark character …

Let’s start with the positives. Trance, the new Danny Boyle film, embraces a distinctly unsettling ambiance. In some respects, it strongly recalls Shallow Grave, his first big hit from way back in ’94, in this respect: unconventionally framed camera shots, a washed and essentially anonymous palette (Shallow Grave was more about shadows), a juddering juxtaposition of scenes that keeps the the viewer on the back foot constantly.
It’s a film about crime and amnesia, so the stylistic tics are quite in tune. Simon (James McAvoy) is an art auctioneer whose bad …

Audacious, brilliantly conceived, and unafraid of controversy, the poster designed by Daniel Josefsohn for the Jewish Film Festival Berlin & Potsdam 2013, with its bright yellow background, film-reel Star of David and provocative slogan “We Come in Peace” was my introduction to the festival, as I looked at the website from my Tel Aviv apartment.
Coming to Germany for the first time, in my encounter with Berlin, Potsdam and the festival, I felt that the poster was the perfect starting point for my journey of discovery, revealing the character of this …

Rachel is 9, and has the countenance of absolute gloom. She’s not looking forward to the start of the new school year; going to bed with her bag strapped to her back suggests as much. Mind you, the problems might lie as much at home as with the life exterior. She shares her bedroom with her grandmother, seemingly catatonic even though she was chucked out of her nursing home for…well, as she puts it, “I’m sure he had a heart complaint beforehand.” As for her parents? Michel Gladstein, her father, …

Angelina Jolie is a rather unexpected poster-girl (yes, I pick my words carefully) for the Israeli arms industry. I mean, she could be, given that men selling guns like to jazz up their sales pitches with a bit of incongruous glamour. But you know what I mean. Still, when she whips out the intriguingly named Cornershot – as the name suggests, it allows the user to dispatch baddies around blind corners, thanks to a swivelling mechanism – in her 2008 film Wanted, she gives invaluable publicity to the ingenuity of …

Eran Riklis has completed shooting his new film Dancing Arabs. Sayed Kashua wrote the script based on his eponymous debut novel, and his third novel, Second Person Singular. Starring Tawfeek Barhom, Ali Suliman, Yael Abecassis, Daniel Kitsis, Michael Moshonov, Laëtitia Eïdo, and Norman Issa, the film was shot in Jerusalem and Kfar Kassem over the course of 33 days.
The film tells the story of Eyad (Barhoum), a boy from an Arab village who has the opportunity to attend a prestigious boarding school in Jerusalem. Eyad tries hard to fit in …