There are hundreds of great movies playing at the 40th Haifa International Film Festival, which runs through January 11, and although there’s no way to see everything, I did manage to catch several of the most anticipated films playing there.
Most of these films will open throughout Israel in 2025 and will be shown again at Haifa during the next week.
One advantage for English speakers of seeing a movie at a film festival is that the festivals show films with English titles, unlike the theater chains, which offer English subtitles only occasionally.
As these films open in theaters, I will provide full reviews, but here is a preview.
The opening-night film was Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, and it was the perfect choice. It’s a fascinating drama that can be described as Hitchcock meets the Islamic Republic of Iran. The movie is about a judicial investigator for the Islamic Revolutionary Court, who is on track to become a judge. His family’s future will be set, and his wife and daughters are excited over the prospect of a bigger apartment and more appliances.
But it turns out to be more complicated than all of them anticipated. It’s September 2022, the time of the Woman Life Freedom protests, and the father is pressured to rubber-stamp death sentences for some of the protest organizers, which troubles him despite the fact that he essentially supports the regime.
A friend of one of his daughters gets attacked at an anti-government demonstration, and the investigator’s wife and daughters choose to help her. Most troubling to the household is the disappearance of the investigator’s gun, which he was given for protection against disgruntled citizens who don’t agree with the court’s harsh stance. He is forced to wonder: Could someone from his family have taken it?
All these elements blend to make this one of the most suspenseful and thought-provoking films of the year. The movie has a chance to win Best International Feature Oscar, a category in which it was nominated not by Iran but by Germany, which helped finance the film.
Several other movies with major Oscar buzz are showing at Haifa, among them The Brutalist, which was the opening film at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival. This is the kind of self-important movie that wins awards, but not one that anyone honestly enjoys seeing.
Adrien Brody plays a Hungarian-Jewish architect who immigrates to the US after surviving Nazi concentration camps. In America, he develops and popularizes the brutalist architecture style of which he was a master in Budapest.
However, this is a bloated movie, which runs over three and a half hours to tell a story that could quite easily take 90 minutes, and the summary makes it sound better than it is. We almost never see his work except as scaffolding in the building stages, so even architecture buffs will feel cheated.
As far as I could tell, the point of it all was the architect’s uneasy relationship with his philistine, wealthy patron, played by Guy Pearce with an American accent, a Donald Trump type. We get it, artists are subjugated by capitalists. Virtually everyone but me will tell you what a masterpiece this is, but if you value your time, trust me.
September 5, another film that was also shown at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival, is a gripping docudrama about the journalists, most of them sports journalists, who found themselves covering the terror attack by the Palestinian Black September group at the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which 11 members of the Israeli team were taken hostage and murdered.
It’s a strange combination of Broadcast News, that famous comedy-drama about the staff of a TV news show, and a documentary about the Munich massacre. Leonie Benesch, the actress who just starred in The Teacher’s Lounge, plays the only translator they have, who helps them cover the unfolding story.
The movie shows how, in many ways, the sports journalists are out of their depth, while at the same time, their naivete makes them look at the unfolding tragedy in a more direct and interesting way than the traditional newscasters.
High hopes
I was looking forward to seeing Richard Gere in Savi Gabizon’s remake of his own 2017 Israeli film, Longing, but the movie is a misfire. Gere, who has previously worked with Israeli directors a number of times in films such as Oren Moverman’s The Dinner and Time Out of Mind and Joseph Cedar’s Norman, is appealing as always in a story that starts out with an intriguing concept.
A high-powered businessman learns he had a son he never knew about and also that this 19-year-old just died in a car accident. As promising as that may sound, the script quickly falls apart, and it’s strictly for people who see Gere in everything.
The israeli competition at the festival, which now includes both feature films and documentaries in one category, started off strong with Halisa, a feature by Sophie Artus, about a childless nurse going through IVF. She becomes attached to a young mother she sees in her practice, who is having trouble caring for her own baby.
While it may sound formulaic, it’s anything but, anchored by a fine performance by Noa Koler in the lead. Halisa is the name of a mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood in Haifa, and the movie brings it to life very vividly. A group of nurses from a pediatric clinic there who helped the filmmakers attended the premiere, and it was clear that their input gave the movie a sense of authenticity.
Veronica Kedar’s Day Trippers, another Israeli feature in competition, tells the story of a teen British girl and a 30-something Israeli woman who bond when they take mushrooms together in Amsterdam.
The more appealing that idea sounds to you, the more you will like the film, which has many clever flourishes, including animation, a thrift-store visit, and Oscar Wilde references, and each character has an emotional backstory that is gradually revealed. If people in their 20s still go to the movies, this will surely be a hit.
For the full schedule of the Haifa International Film Festival, go to the website at haifaff.co.il/eng