Discoveries from Israel World Cinema

Israel, 1961. Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, responsible for organizing the extermination of European Jews, is sentenced to death.

South America, 1960. A lonely and grumpy Holocaust survivor convinces himself that his new neighbor is none other than Adolf Hitler. Not being taken seriously, he starts an independent investigation to prove his claim, but when the evidence still appears to be inconclusive, Polsky is forced to engage in a relationship with the enemy in order to obtain irrefutable proof.

Rebecca, an American who has been living in Jerusalem for a few months now, has just broken off her engagement. She gets into a cab driven by Hanna, an Israeli. But Hanna is on her way to Jordan, to the Free Zone, to pick up a large sum of money.

Maya and Aviv Berger have built a perfect life for themselves - a stable relationship, successful careers, and a son they love more than anything. But when a series of medical tests reveals a shocking secret, their world begins to crumble. As Maya dives deeper in search of the truth, she uncovers strange contradictions and half-truths that lead her back to an incident that occurred years earlier. What began as a medical challenge quickly turns into a gripping mystery – one that ends with a major surprise.

Skin Deep is a tragic comedy of a destined loser who will do anything to prove that the destiny is wrong. A story of a hopeless romantic who wants to surprise his love one with a tattoo on his left arm carrying her name, and ends up by surprising her with another lover. Now he has tow options: abandon his belief in an eternal love or find another girl with the same name.

Sallah Shabati, the patriarch of a big family recently arrived to Israel from Yemen, tries to make money and get better housing, in a country that can barely provide for its own and is in the midst of absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

The year is 1964. Rachel Brener is one of 3 young Mossad agents teem who caught "THE SURGEON OF BIRKENAU" - a Nazi monster who was never brought to trial in Israel. The official reason was that he was shot to death while trying to escape from Israeli captivity in a safe house somewhere in Europe. 30 years after, the well communicated death story of the monster could be questionable, a small article appears in a local unimportant paper in a small town in Ukraine. Surprisingly the Surgeon is ALIVE and is willing to admit his crimes against the human race and especially the Jews. The 3 older x Mossad agents who are in their late 60th became aware to this unfortunate threatening knowledge. The fact was that the "Surgeon" managed to escape from his guards 30 years ago.

The taboo relationship between young Nadav and his Aunt Nina transcends definition on its way to odd highs and lows.

Although Nuni has been selected to play the lead (King David) in his Jerusalem grade school play, he'd secretly rather play the princess role instead.

Their family name alone evokes horror: Himmler, Frank, Goering, Hoess. This film looks at the descendants of the most powerful figures in the Nazi regime: men and women who were left a legacy that indelibly associates them with one of the greatest abominations in history. What is it like to have grown up with a name that immediately raises images of genocide? How do they live with the weight of their ancestors' crimes? Is it possible to move on from the crimes of their ancestors?

Two young men — a Palestinian grad student and an Israeli lawyer — meet and fall in love amidst personal and political intrigue.

Zaza is a 31-year old Israeli bachelor, handsome and intelligent, and his family wants to see him married. But tradition dictates that Zaza has to choose a young virgin. She must be beautiful and from a good family, preferably rich. Zaza's parents, Yasha and Lily drag Zaza to meet potential brides and their families. Zaza has no choice. He plays along with his family, advocates of the suffocating traditions of their Georgian Jewish heritage. But Zaza always manages to somehow get out of being engaged. What his parents don't know is that Zaza is already in love. Judith is sensuous, strong and intriguing. She's also a divorcée with a 6-year-old daughter. So Zaza has kept Judith a secret from his family. He will have to choose between respect of the strict confines of family and tradition, or the love of his life.

A failed businessman must kill himself to pay off a loan shark or his family will die, but a detective discovers the case turns on a shocking secret.

In July 1976, an Air France flight from Tel-Aviv to Paris via Athens was hijacked and forced to land in Entebbe, Uganda. The Jewish passengers were separated and held hostage in demand to release many terrorists held in Israeli prisons. After much debate, the Israeli government sent an elite commando unit to raid the airfield and release the hostages.

In the easy-going, sexually-liberated 1970's Tel Aviv, three young friends, struggling filmmaker Nati, his impressionable girlfriend Ossi and his geeky friend Mushon, move in together in a small apartment in Dizengoff Street number 99. By day, they work a boring desk office job but by night the city is their playground. Their overall goal is to make their way into the commercial movie making business, but harsh realities and romances often sidetrack them. Their fourth friend and Nati's older other girlfriend is aspiring musician, Miri.

Filmmaker Talya Lavie steps into the spotlight with a dark comedy about everyday life for a unit of young female Israeli soldiers. The human resources office at a remote desert base serves as the setting for this cast of characters, who bide their time pushing paper, battling for the top score in Minesweeper, and counting down the minutes until they can return to civilian life. Amidst their boredom and clashing personalities, issues of commitment—from friendship to love and country—are handled with humor and sharp-edged wit.

A teacher discovers in a five year-old child a prodigious gift for poetry. Amazed and inspired by this young boy, she decides to protect his talent in spite of everyone.

The story of Ohad Naharin, renowned choreographer and artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company, an artistic genius who redefined the language of modern dance.

Or shoulders a lot: she's 17 or 18, a student, works evenings at a restaurant, recycles cans and bottles for cash, and tries to keep her mother Ruthie from returning to streetwalking in Tel Aviv. Ruthie calls Or "my treasure," but Ruthie is a burden. She's just out of hospital, weak, and Or has found her a job as a house cleaner. The call of the quick money on the street is tough for Ruthie to ignore. Or's emotions roil further when the mother of the youth she's in love with comes to the flat to warn her off. With love fading and Ruthie perhaps beyond help, Or's choices narrow.

The movie is a post-apocalyptic horror/science fiction film. the setting is in a near post apocalyptic future where a biological warfare program goes wrong, and turns most of humanity to mindless, murderous creatures.

While her husband struggles to keep his restaurant in business, a mother of three lands a job as an assistant to a powerful, but sexually harrassive realtor and brings herself to fight back.

BEAUFORT tells the story of LIRAZ LIBERTI, the 22 year-old outpost commander, and his troops in the months before Israel pulled out of Lebanon. This is not a story of war, but of retreat. This is a story with no enemy, only an amorphous entity that drops bombs from the skies while terrified young soldiers must find a way to carry out their mission until their very last minutes on that mountaintop.

A Hungarian youth comes of age at Buchenwald during World War II. György Köves is 14, the son of a merchant who's sent to a forced labor camp. After his father's departure, György gets a job at a brickyard; his bus is stopped and its Jewish occupants sent to camps. There, György find camaraderie, suffering, cruelty, illness, and death. He hears advice on preserving one's dignity and self-esteem. He discovers hatred. If he does survive and returns to Budapest, what will he find? What is natural; what is it to be a Jew? Sepia, black and white, and color alternate to shade the mood.

An estranged couple receives an unexpected visitor who throws everything in their family off balance.

The film was shot entirely in a nightclub, with an adjoining contemporary art gallery, whose customers are both Israelis and Palestinians, in one of Israel’s most open cities, Haifa. A long night in a place where the most diverse people meet: Jews, Muslims, gays, heterosexuals, transvestites; and three women, who in that multifaceted microcosm, a gathering peaceful hideout, can find shelter from male bullying and arrogance.

A man finds his stolen bicycle, but now it belongs to a stranger. How much of himself will he lose to get it back?

Sergio Konstanza, a swindler, owes money to Mr. Hasson. He escapes to the desert where he joins a wacky army reserve unit whose Sergeant is engaged to one of Mr. Hasson's Daughters.

Salam, an inexperienced young Palestinian man, becomes a writer on a popular soap opera after a chance meeting with an Israeli soldier. His creative career is on the rise - until the soldier and the show's financial backers disagree about how the show should end, and Salam is caught in the middle.

A group of friends at a Jerusalem retirement home build a machine for self-euthanasia in order to help their terminally ill friend. When rumors of the machine begin to spread, more and more people ask for their help, and the friends are faced with an emotional dilemma

Thomas, a young German baker, is having an affair with Oren, an Israeli married man who has frequent business visits in Berlin. When Oren dies in a car crash in Israel, Thomas travels to Jerusalem seeking for answers regarding his death. Under a fabricated identity, Thomas infiltrates the life of Anat, his lover’s newly widowed wife, who owns a small Café in downtown Jerusalem. Thomas starts to work for her, creating German cakes and cookies that bring her Café to life. Thomas finds himself involved in Anat’s life in a way far beyond his anticipation. To protect the truth he will stretch his lie to a point of no return.

The story is about two twin brothers, Azriel and Gavriel. Azriel is a shy, religious Jew who works in a fruit shop in Jaffa. Gavriel is a hoodlum and a good-for-nothing hustler who runs a snooker bar. Gavriel and his friend Hanuka make easy money by swindling people into gambling on snooker games. One day Gavriel is forced to renew contact with his brother because he is in trouble with a gangster.

Rachel Strode, a young immigrant with a dark secret in her past, comes to Israel in the Fall of 1973 to volunteer in a Kibbutz and then to convert to Judaism. Soon, she realizes that the local Kibbutz members don't seem to like strangers and foreigners, and that the evening of Yom Kippur (the most important holiday for Jews), will bring danger to her and her young volunteering friends. What begins as a time of fun and the celebration of youth turns into a menacing and bloody night of terror, which will give a new meaning to Yom Kippur of 1973.

Yasmine, an openly lesbian Arab nurse, finds out that her lover, Or, an intelligence officer in the Israeli army has been reporting on their relationship. Yasmine's sister arrives for a visit from the West Bank, not knowing that she is going to meet the occupying enemy at her own sister's house.

A gay New York Times travel writer comes to Tel Aviv after suffering a tragedy. The energy of the city and his relationship with a younger man brings him back to life.

After many years working far from home, Mila is forced to temporarily leave her seaside mansion—and her secret romance—to return to her family in a remote Polish village. But the long-awaited reunion is far from what she imagined. As tensions surface, Mila struggles to repair what was lost, confronting the cost of her choices and the woman she has become.

Set in Tel Aviv, focuses on an interconnected group of friends and their various relationships. At the center is the adorably bookish Omer, about to turn 30, who still hasn't found himself, and his free-spirited best friend Miki, who both end up inadvertently dating the same handsome journalist, Ronen.

In 1939, Kalman, an ambitious young businessman, leaves Europe to join his sister Samantha in Palestine. She lives with Dov, an idealistic architect obsessed with the Bauhaus style. With their friends, they form a group, which discusses the future Israeli State.

When two generations of Israeli women fall for a German woman and a Palestinian man, chaos follows. What happens with lovers who don't fit but do belong together?

The excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch Jewish philosopher who revolutionized modern thought, is a formative, mysterious event in the understanding of his work. Director David Ofek takes us on an intercontinental journey tracing six reasons for Spinoza's excommunication. Between Amsterdam, the Hague, New York, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, he makes some surprising discoveries, and traces the figure of a man who continues to intrigue our culture with his ideas, which remain revolutionary, spiritual, and radical to this day. This is the 17th film in The Hebrews project.

The story of the two teenagers that murdered a taxi driver without a reason caused a great shock in Israel. it was on all newspapers and on TV. Those two teenagers lived amongst normative and supporting families, and despite that turned to the life of crime. The movie tries to show what happened before that murder and the things which, may have, led to it.

Danny gets dumped by Noa, who finds it difficult to bear his sensibilities. Devastated about her ignoring his calls, he inadvertently discovers that he is not a human being, but in fact, an engineered robot. As he gains confidence to confront her, he finds out that Noa has been kidnapped - and that they're both entangled in a high-tech conspiracy hoping to utilize robot-humans for violence.

Steve & Chuma , two criminals are the sole survivors of a terrorist attack at a restaurant in Jerusalem. They decide to change their ways and become flesh and blood angels. They go on a journey of wish fulfilment for people who write requests on paper and put between the sacred stones of the Wailing Wall.

The film captures the daily duality of three young Palestinian women in Tel Aviv, caught between hometown tradition and big city abandon, and the price they must pay for a lifestyle that seems obvious to many: the freedom to work, party, have sex, and choose.

A young Arab is caught between cultures as he is sent to a prestigious Jewish boarding school in Israel in the 1980s.

In this hilarious crime comedy, a gifted 12-year-old boy and three elderly men plan a bank robbery in order to seek revenge on the institution for cheating the youngster after the death of his father.

Eliran Ben-Tovim, a star soccer coach on the verge of national glory, loses everything after a violent outburst during a crucial match. Banned from professional football, he reluctantly accepts coaching a failing middle-school team in a remote northern village. There, among misfit kids and unexpected love, Eliran rediscovers his passion for the game and for life, ultimately choosing purpose and community over fame.

The body of a middle aged woman is discovered and a promising young police officer is assigned to this case. His name is Ataf and he is of Druze origin - a small sect of people whose religion is secret and who hold a firm belief in reincarnation. Through the course of his investigation, Ataf begins to experience some strange nightmares that carry him to his past. Soon after he begins his search for a clue to these nightmares, and realises that the murder case and his dreams are somehow connected. More than that - the connection has to do with his former life that ended tragically when his present life began.

When ten-year-old Aya is left at a kibbutz where children are housed by age instead of gender, not only does she have to get used to dealing with a lot of children, making friends and enemies, she also has to get used to sharing her room with boys... and sharing the showers with them too.

Twenty years before the spectacle of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu already understood the political benefits of a toxic relationship with the media, and direct communication with the public. King Bibi explores Netanyahu's rise to power, relying solely on archival footage of his media performances over the years: from his days as a popular guest expert on American TV, through his public confession of adultery, and his mastery of the art of social media. From one studio to another, "Bibi" evolved from Israel's great political hope, to a controversial figure whom some perceive as Israel's savior, and others - as a cynical politician who will stop at nothing to retain his power.

The year is 1968. To a small town in the south of Israel, mostly inhabited by Moroccan immigrants, a few families from India arrive, searching for a better life in the west. The instinct driven Moroccans patronize the "black" Indians, while the quiet Indians see the Moroccans as Ignorant and coarse. In this cultural war two girls, Moroccan and Indian, discover the sexual revolution of the 60's.

The story takes place in Haifa, Israel, in 1979, during three days before the Shabbat. A young woman trying to raise three children, work from home, and observe the strict Moroccan traditions of her family finds herself at constant odds with her husband and her brothers, who want her to stay married and leave behind the notions of being loved and free.

A sociological study of two men in the Israeli army who are lovers. The others in the unit react to their situation, suspecting, but not always understanding. One will leave the military soon, a few months away, as a snowy and desolate outpost is guarded from attack.

Hard to say exactly when did Israel turn from a country based on socialist ideals to a capitalist country, living the 'work-shop-throw out' dream. Is it the constant security threat that brings us to live and shop as if it was our last day? Why do the Banks and the authorities encourage over consumerism? And how does the fact the every third Israeli has no credit have to do with it? "More and More" tracks back the rise of Consumerism in Israel, from the first austerity days of the young country, to the piles of garbage of today.

Based on Ladislav Grossman's novel "The Bride", this drama was filmed back in 1984 in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, then the crew stopped filming, because protagonist Lisa Hartman had to promote her feature film "Where The Boys Are '84" in the States and they finally finished it on location in Wasserburg, Germany!

The film takes place in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War in which Egypt and Syria launched attacks in Sinai and the Golan Heights. The story is told from the perspective of Israeli soldiers. We are led by Weinraub and his friend Ruso on a day that begins with quiet city streets, but ends with death, destruction and devastation of both body and mind. Various scenes are awash in the surreal, as Weinraub's head hangs out over a rescue helicopter's open door, watching with tranquil desperation as the earth passes beneath, the overpowering whir of the blades creating a hypnotic state. It is not a traditional blood, guts and glory film. There are no men in battle, only the rescue crew trying to pick up the broken pieces.

Cracks are starting to burst in Marina's frozen life, leading towards finding refuge in dangerous places.

Meduzot (the Hebrew word for Jellyfish) tells the story of three very different Israeli women living in Tel Aviv whose intersecting stories weave an unlikely portrait of modern Israeli life. Batya, a catering waitress, takes in a young child apparently abandoned at a local beach. Batya is one of the servers at the wedding reception of Keren, a young bride who breaks her leg in trying to escape from a locked toilet stall, which ruins her chance at a romantic honeymoon in the Caribbean. One of the guests is Joy, a Philippine chore woman attending the event with her employer, and who doesn't speak any Hebrew (she communicates mainly in English), and who is guilt-ridden after having left her young son behind in the Philippines.

Now that Itzhak's father is in a coma, and dying, Itzhak is finally willing to visit him, thus breaking a ten-year silence. During his visits to the hospital, Itzhak, a beaten and reserved man, is frustrated to find himself neglected by his own family: his wife, a long suppressed artist whose life's dream is fulfilled that same week; his twenty-seven-year-old son - a "philosopher" still living at home; and his twenty-five-year-old daughter - a tormented lesbian who has had no contact with her family for a long time. Itzhak doesn't realize, though, that his ten year old daughter, Didush, neglected and almost invisible to her family, is secretly visiting her grandfather whom she has never met previously and sets out to discover the old family secret.

Eli is an Israeli soldier who manages to escape from a notorious Arab prison. He makes it back to Israel, where he finds Beno, another soldier who had spent 2 years of horror in the same prison. They organize a rescue operation against the prison. The soldiers must use both cunning and boldness if they are to help their fellow Israelis regain their freedom.

Jerusalem, Israel. Professors Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik, father and son, have dedicated their lives to the study of the Jewish scriptures. Eliezer is a stubborn and methodical scholar who has never been recognized for his work; Uriel is a rising star, someone admired and praised by his colleagues. The fragile balance that has kept their personal relationship almost intact is broken in an unexpected way by a simple phone call.