Some great Israeli movies have been released during the past year and now these movies, along with some other wonderful films that will be released soon, will be playing on March 26 in theaters all over Israel for NIS 10. Among the most popular recent Israeli movies that will be shown will be Adir Miller’s The Ring, the directorial debut of this beloved stand-up comedian, who also stars in this semi-autobiographical film about a man who goes to Budapest with his estranged daughter to try to reclaim his family’s Holocaust legacy.
Erez Tadmor’s two latest movies are part of the program: Matchmaking 2, a funny but romantic look at dating in the ultra-Orthodox world, and Soda, a period drama starring Lior Raz of Fauda and Rotem Sela from A Body That Works, which tells the story of a former partisan living in Tel Aviv in the 1950s who meets a mysterious woman who may have been a Kapo in Auschwitz.
This has been a great year for women directors in Israel, and you can see Maya Kenig’s The Milky Way, a dystopian comedy about a single mother who sells her breast milk to rich families; it’s a highly original film that succeeds on every level. Maya Dreifuss’s Highway 65 is a suspenseful, neo-noir police thriller starring Tali Sharon and Idan Amedi.
Sophie Artus’s Halisa tells the story of a nurse who works in a pediatric clinic in a mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood in Haifa. Veronica Kedar’s Day Trippers is about an Israeli woman dealing with a crisis by getting high in Amsterdam with a young woman from England.
Unreleased films
This Israeli Cinema Day is also an opportunity to see movies that haven’t been released yet. Nir Bergman’s Pink Lady, which won an award for its director at the Black Nights Film Festival in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, tells the story of a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) couple struggling to deal with the husband’s attraction to men, and will be included in the program.
Anat Maltz’s Real Estate: A Love Story, which won the Israeli Feature Film Competition this year at the Haifa International Film Festival, is about a young couple looking to leave trendy Tel Aviv and settle down in Haifa, who find their day of apartment hunting turns into a turbulent, stressful experience.
As Iran is in the headlines daily, you might be interested in seeing Eran Riklis’s latest film, Reading Lolita in Tehran. It is an adaptation of an Iranian literature professor’s memoir, starring Golshifteh Farahani, who was in Riklis’s Shelter, and Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who co-directed and acted in Tatami, the story of an Iranian judoka.
This Israeli Cinema Day is in honor of the late actor/director Ze’ev Revach, who died in January at age 85. Considered to be one of the most influential and important figures in Israeli cinema, he won three Ophir Awards – the “Israeli Oscar” – two for Best Actor and one for Lifetime Achievement. Culture and Sport Minister Miki Zohar called him, “One of the greatest actors who grew up in Israel,” saying that “Revach gave us unforgettable moments, laughter and tears, and his legacy will continue to live on in the heart of Israeli culture.”
