As the bravery of so many women during wartime is celebrated daily, both the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Cinematheques are offering special programs to mark International Women’s Month in March.
The Jerusalem Cinematheque calls its festival LiaFEST, in honor of Lia van Leer, the founder of that cinematheque, the Haifa Cinematheque, the film festivals in Jerusalem and Haifa, as well as the Israel Film Archive. She was a pioneer who helped create the Israeli film culture that nurtured great directors and helped the film industry develop. She passed away on March 13, 2015, so LiaFEST also commemorates her passing and celebrates her life.
Actress Liv Ullmann was perhaps Ingmar Bergman’s greatest muse and starred in many of his classics. Now she is the subject of a documentary by Dheeraj Akolkar, Liv Ullmann: A Road Less Traveled, which will be shown at LiaFEST. Ullmann, who was once a guest at the Jerusalem Festival, has also turned her talent to directing and writing.
It might be surprising to learn that although she had a well-publicized relationship with Bergman, and the two have a daughter together, Linn, she later married the Boston-based Jewish real estate developer Donald Saunders. The two divorced after 10 years of marriage, but when I interviewed her following the release of Faithless in the early 2000s, she told me they had gotten back together.
LiaFEST will kick off a tribute to Ullmann, which begins on March 10 and will run through the rest of the month, and will present a number of her best-known Bergman films, among them Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, and Autumn Sonata. But she also worked with many other directors, and the tribute includes some of her other acting triumphs, including the two films in which she plays a Swedish woman who moves to America (The Emigrants and The New Land) as well as her early film, 1959’s The Wayward Girl, directed by Edith Carlmar.
Several of the movies she directed will be shown, including Faithless, which has a screenplay by Bergman, and Miss Julie, the Strindberg classic.
THIS YEAR, the festival opens on March 7 with Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year and is nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (a prize many Oscar watchers think it may win), and Best Actress for Sandra Huller. It’s a twisty, complex psychological drama about a troubled couple and a court case. It will open in theaters here later in March and is highly recommended.
LiaFEST will present the best movie that did not open here last year – Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, produced by James L. Brooks, and based on the classic girls’ coming-of-age novel by Judy Blume. Newcomer Abby Ryder Fortson plays Margaret, and Rachel McAdams is her mother. The fact that this film did not receive an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, or in any other category, shows how shallow the awards have become.
The classic 1980 feminist farce, 9 to 5, which stars the unbeatable trio of Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin as secretaries out to get revenge on their horrible, sexist boss (Dabney Coleman), was way ahead of its time. If you can hum the theme song, you should take this chance to see it again on the big screen, and if you don’t know the film, now would be a great time to see it. It was Parton’s first role and the first pairing of Fonda and Tomlin, who went on to star in the Netflix series, Grace and Frankie together.
Other films in LiaFEST include a new documentary about Frida Kahlo; Mona Achache’s Little Girl Lost, a semi-documentary look at the life of the director’s late mother, starring Marion Cotillard; and Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, about a young Frenchwoman who was adopted from Korea and who searches for her biological parents.
What to expect at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque
THE TEL AVIV Cinematheque is also featuring a women’s film festival that starts this week and runs till the end of the month, called The Female Gaze. It is an extensive festival, featuring recent films from Israel and abroad, and it also will show Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Other foreign films include How to Have Sex by Molly Manning Walker, about three British girls on a vacation to a party resort town that turns sour; Vishniac, a documentary by Laura Bialis, about the photographer famed for his portraits of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before World War II; and Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance, which stars Killers of the Flower Moon’s Best Actress nominee, Lily Gladstone, as a Native-American woman who takes desperate measures to keep her family together.
There will be a number of previews of foreign films set to open here later, including Reality, directed by Tina Satter and starring Sydney Sweeney, which is based on the FBI investigation of a former US intelligence specialist who was accused of releasing information about Russian interference in the American elections; and Moroccan director Maryam Touzani’s The Blue Caftan, the story of a dying woman whose husband is sexually drawn to an apprentice in their caftan business.
There will also be several upcoming Israeli movies shown in preview screenings. One of these will be Hila, the new movie by Michal Bat-Adam, one of Israel’s most celebrated actress/directors. Jade Daiches Weeks stars in the title role, as a woman who has not told her lover (Yaakov Zada-Daniel) that he is the father of her daughter.
Another preview will be Wait for Me, by Sari Azoulay Turgeman, a drama about a stubborn teenager who runs away on her family’s boat in an attempt to track down her father. Idan Hubel’s Ten Months is about the obstacles a woman encounters on the road to becoming a mother.
Tsipi Karlik’s documentary Social Workers at War looks at the role these crucial women played in helping victims of the October 7 attack by Hamas.
There will be a tribute to the work of Israeli director/producer/cinematographer Avigail Sperber. Among the films shown will be her recent documentary, Inbal Perlmutter – If You Let Me Go, a look at the short and turbulent life of a rock star.
For details of LiaFEST, go to jer-cin.org.il and for the Female Gaze, go to cinema.co.il