Discoveries from Israel World Cinema

A young ignorant boy ignores all warning which leads him to his demise.

Amidst the Israel-Hamas war, a film student goes on a personal quest to find love

1973: Young postal pilot Shai meets the love of his life behind the vast dunes of the Sinai, only to lose her to the war in that very moment. A single decision leads him to failure and a sense of guilt that haunts him for fifty years—until a new war forces him to confront his past.

A teenage boy goes to a forest to find love and learns an important lesson.

They have finished their high school studies and deferred their service in the Israeli army to volunteer for a year's community work and preliminary military training in a special pre-enlistment program in Gilo, Jerusalem. These young men and women are both religious and secular, of a variety of political persuasions - are typical products of Israeli society trying to live together for one year during which they hope to get to know one another and to put the prejudices they have grown up with to the test of daily life. In the course of this "survival year," the main characters pour out their hearts and say what many Israelis think and feel. They provide us with a rare opportunity to observe Israeli society as it appears through the eyes of young people awaiting the start of their military service who have found themselves, one year too early, in the front line.

Right before Daniel, a high-tech guy, is about to sell his company and make millions, a strange woman comes to his office and tells him that his wife is having an affair with her husband. To convince him, she pulls him into a series of escalating role plays that become dangerous.

A struggling actress locks herself with her indifferent agent, demanding answers. A fleeting audition offer sparks their hopes, but when it vanishes, they remain trapped in mediocrity.

Mor only wanted to meet her end, but instead she meets an incompetent angel.

A highly emotional family movie about friendship and faith, that reminds us all what really makes us winners. Eliran Ben-Tovim is a coacher in the Super League who has done a foul in the biggest game of the season. When the unification rules that he should stop coaching, he finds himself moving to the northern side of the country to coach a failing children team in the middleschool. In the north, Eliran discovers a talentless team, that never won a game. Against all odds, Eliran tries to lead his new team to victory against their arch-nemesis - The "Gordon" Team.

Two nobodies talking about nothing as they wait for their laundry to finish.

A musical film that chronicles the story of Lee-Mon, a young and brilliant billionaire, from his difficult childhood to a successful lemonade empire.

A unique point of view at the colorful crowd flowing through Tel Aviv’s veins.

The three anonymous protagonists of the film are each sent to a different type of community a kibbutz, moshav, and moshava, to learn about their special characteristics and the different lifestyles of their residents, and also meet a mysterious girl along the way. In this part, we follow our hero who was sent to a kibbutz.

The three anonymous protagonists of the film are each sent to a different type of community a kibbutz, moshav, and moshava, to learn about their special characteristics and the different lifestyles of their residents, and also meet a mysterious girl along the way. In this part, we follow our hero who was sent to a moshava.

A young soldier catches a cockroach during a moment of boredom at his base. In doing so, memories from his childhood surface, of a time when he discovered the world through curious eyes and used to catch pigeons and release them along the seashore.

A mother comes to visit her son at his pre-military academy in kibbutz Sha’ar HaGolan. They spend a day together, just like old times when he was a boy.

"Petrozilia" is a short drama about Rachel, a young woman who is preparing to get married but feels embarrassed to introduce her father to her fiancé. Her father, a vendor of spices and herbs at the Machane Yehuda market, represents part of her identity that she fears will not fit her future life. The film explores themes of family, social expectations, personal identity, and acceptance as Rachel navigates her feelings about her father and her upcoming marriage.

Through animation, the film explores the tensions and harmonies between violence and geometry, spirituality and simplicity, childhood playfulness and existence itself, searching for meaning in these contrasts.

The world of a young woman explored through a cinematic stream-of-consciousness foray.

After the tragic death of his brother in a bicycle accident, Eitan refuses to accept the uncertainty surrounding what really happened. During a memorial that reignites buried anger, he becomes convinced that his brother’s best friend is hiding a dark truth about that night. As Eitan sinks deeper into his obsession for answers, he pushes away those closest to him and begins to blur the line between grief, guilt, and revenge. One fateful night forces him to confront a painful question: how does one death ripple through the lives of everyone left behind—not just his own?

In the last years of the USSR, a graduate of a technical university and a researcher at the Research Institute of Chemical Physics, Leonid Katsis, began to actively engage in literary criticism, following only his own ideas about what to consider as an established fact. The appearance of such an uncompromising figure frightens, irritates some professional philologists, and those literary critics who, like Leonid Fridovich himself, came to the profession from technical fields.

This musical is the story of a talented, streetwise kid from Brooklyn who attempts to escape his dead-end life through dancing.The year is 1979 and Tony Manero has only one ambition in life - to become the disco king. His weekend is spent at the local discotheque. There he luxuriates in the admiration of the crowd, and can temporarily forget the realities of his life, including a dead-end job in a paint store and his gang of deadbeat friends. Based on the 1977 ilm that became a cultural phenomenon, the electrifying score is packed with legendary hits from the Bee Gees.

Harry is a seasoned detective, but when a new case arrives late at night, Harry finds himself a bit too tired to solve it.

Memories captured from a distant time & space, spanning 3 weeks of a journey to the east.

A neurotic young woman gets off the bus at the wrong stop in Jerusalem, a city she doesn’t know well. She calls her boyfriend to come and rescue her. The encounter with a strange city sets off a stormy subconscious journey which will compel her, for the first time, to choose whether to live her life with her boyfriend or on her own.

An unusual breakup.

Exhausted from a long day, corporate lawyers Etty Levi (29) and Ran Levi (30) arrive at their hotel only to discover a booking error has left them with a single room and one shared bed. Refusing to succumb to her annoying colleague, Etty uses her black stockings to establish a strict, absolute border across the mattress, initiating a high-stakes, competitive wager: the first one to cross the 'Black Border' sleeps on the sofa. What follows is a sharp and cunning battle of wits between two professionals determined to win, where the true challenge is not their legal careers, but the undeniable attraction that lies between them.

A unique black comedy. Boaz, a frustrated filmmaker, and Lily, a fired youth counselor, meet in an anger management class and discover a shared calling — to teach life lessons to the people who really deserve it.

This is the story of a bird who could not lay an egg. What price will she pay to finally become a mother?

Tribute to Rene Magritte's surrealistic world. A train exits the saxophone and passes through the frame, forming a comic strip that presents us a modern, alienated society.

In postwar Königsberg, displaced East Prussians and arriving Soviet settlers were forced to live side by side, bound by loss and survival. Through interviews, archives, and stage fragments, this documentary explores the fragile encounters across enemy lines.

Two teens try to share an intimate evening at one of their parents’ homes, hiding their relationship and sexual identity. But constant interruptions from the family outside force them to confront the real issues between them.

Alon, the film’s director, revisits a traumatic Purim night in Jerusalem, when he returned to sex work in a park just to afford a Queen Esther costume. Through a fusion of cinematic reenactments, documentary fragments, and a renewed connection to Esther herself, Alon seeks to reclaim control over a painful memory — transforming trauma into meaning, and finding in Purim a path toward redemption and self-understanding.

A teenage girl arrives at an unusual home for a piano lesson, during which she loses her mind.

A mother nervously awaits her son to come back from the battlefield, when a knock on her door threatens to fulfill her worst fears.

Naomi’s Questions is an intimate and poetic documentary about Naomi, a 34-year-old woman with Williams syndrome. Filmed by her father over more than thirty years—mainly in their family home in Old Jaffa—the film explores Naomi’s journey toward independence after leaving home at 21. Blending archival footage, present scenes, and poetic re-enactments, the film becomes a cinematic letter—a dialogue between a father and his luminous daughter. Through this personal and collective memory, it questions how we perceive difference, vulnerability, and intelligence. Inspired by the Kabbalistic idea of Tikkun Olam, it suggests that those often seen as “wounded by fate” may carry the seed of our collective healing.

A Jerusalem couple set off on a journey. Against a backdrop of beauty, belief and great violence, they begin a film of their lives.

Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer and Russian author David Gurevich document the aftermath of the June 1, 2001 suicide bombing of Tel Aviv's Dolphinarium Disco, which killed 21 and wounded 105, many of them teenagers and many recent immigrants from post-Soviet Union states. The bulk of the film consists of the interviews with survivors and the victims' parents, all shot around the Tel Aviv area, including the location outside the Dolphinarium proper. It also makes extensive use of the footage of the night of the disaster and the home videos left behind by the victims.

An unusual resemblance between Tovi, the Limon’s anciant dog, and Guri, a dog starring an old israeli picture book named “Nurit and Guri”, leads the family to try and trace Guri’s owner - the girl from the book, Nurit. 2nd place winner of high-school contest in DocAviv 2020 Festival.

The town of Zinkiv, where people of different nationalities and religions lived in harmony and peace in the 1950s, is actually a paradise that was not on the map of the former USSR: mysteriously, it simply "fell" out of the field of vision of the totalitarian system. The Orthodox church, Jewish synagogue, Catholic church, and Islamic heritage site—an old Turkish fortress—coexisted peacefully and naturally there.

Adi, 14, was born into a gay co-parenting family. As he grows up, the tense balance at his father’s home begins to crack. When their relationship is put to the test, Adi faces his world, and his home, upended.

Daniel, who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, goes to visit his grandmother who lives alone in a desert village. He tries to write but fails. When he enters a gay dating site in order to relieve the stress of writing a little, he encounters Saleh and they meet on the trunk of a dead tree near the village. Daniel is very afraid that Saleh will not be interested in him, but the fear and distance alternate with a gentle closeness. Daniel takes Saleh to his home and there the three characters connect for the rest of a day of closeness, warmth, and an accepting and simple stay, which finally manages to get Daniel to start writing.

After an embarrassing incident at work, Luda, a museum guard, realizes she can't defend herself due to her shyness and language barrier. As a result, she decides to fight for her place in the world.

In a desolate, wind-swept, abandoned building, a young woman lies in bed and fantasizes about her love as she tries to fill the hollow space in her heart.

A short cinematic travel film of Georgia

When a normal citizen wants to protect a dog that has been abused by his master, his good will got out of control and became a bloody killing spree.

Klezmer at a jewish wedding.

This sociological journey back in time began over twenty years ago when several families were evicted from their homes. They got together and squatted in an abandoned building in Jaffa for two years. The children of all ages who lived there grew up around violence, poverty, and drugs-but also solidarity. They saw the power of people fighting the establishment for their right to a home. They became documentary subjects for the first time in 1999, in Yael Kipper and Einat Fishbein's film The Two Yossi (screened at the very first Docaviv Festival). Now, their journey continues: what has become of them? What chances does a poverty-stricken child have to make it in the world?

In the sweltering heat of northern Israel's Beit Shean Valley, a group of young activists leads a protest with a simple goal: demanding kibbutz Nir David to allow access to the river that flows through the kibbutz, as the law permits but its members deny. The director of The Waterfront joins them as their protest evolves and intensifies, raising questions about social inequalities, accumulation by dispossession, and the rule of law that extends far beyond the valley's borders.

Video tapes filmed years ago in New York reappear one day in a couple's apartment. The content undermines the man's trust in his wife to be. The dispute around the video footage leads the woman on a quest seeking out those who were her companions in a hectic experience, with their help she uncovers the ways in which her repression mechanism has led her astray. Blocked memories of the past start to awaken, dancing naked in front of men demanding sex at the strip club, a champagne room where women would take clients for a private session. She unravels her past and one painful memory she has repressed for years, when as a teenager, she entered a room where her innocence was stripped of her

"Der Nister" (The Hidden), that's how Colleen Shabtai called the house where she dreamed of a happy family. Together with poet Aaron Shabtai, she raised six children in a Jerusalem house, until they got divorced. As a teenager, their son, Nahar, began documenting his family. He filmed 20 years of family life, from a house full of children, until it turned empty and old. Only his mother and brother Lemuel remained there. He is unable to lead an independent life while she refuses to part with her role as mother. The grandfather's inheritance runs out, forcing them to leave the house, a departure which is a critical moment for his mother, his brother and Nahar himself.

TALENT ONLY GETS YOU SO FAR