‘Asia,’ ‘Here We Are’ among films to compete at Jerusalem Film Festival
There will be prizes totaling NIS 500,000 that will be given to award winners.
By HANNAH BROWNJohn Benjamin Hickey (right) and Niv Nissim are set to star in the Tel Aviv-based film Sublet from Israeli director Eytan Fox(photo credit: DANIEL MILLER)
While theaters may be closed at the moment, Israeli cinema isn’t standing still, and 34 feature films, documentaries and shorts have been selected to take part in competitions at the 37th Jerusalem Film Festival. The festival, which is run by the Jerusalem Cinematheque, will take place online – and possibly with some in-person events if approved by the Health Ministry – from December 10 to 20.There will be prizes totaling NIS 500,000 that will be given to award winners. The festival will open with Eytan Fox’s film Sublet, and there will be a special screening of Eran Kolirin’s The Exchange.The Haggiag Competition for Israeli Feature Films will include: Ruthy Pribar’s Asia, about a complicated mother-daughter relationship, which won several prizes at the Tribeca Film Festival (including Best Actress for Shira Haas) and just won the Ophir Award for Best Picture last week; Nir Bergman’s Here We Are, a drama about a father and his autistic son on a road trip, which was accepted into the Cannes Film Festival this year; Aspiration for Life by Matan Guggenheim and Assaf Aviri, the story an elderly man placed in a nursing home against his will who gets involved in crime and medical cannabis; Nadav Schirman’s This Night, a fact-based drama about a deadly terror attack on Kibbutz Misgav Am in 1980 in which children were taken hostage and The Death of the Cinema and My Father Too, directed by Danny Rosenberg, about a father and son who try to use movies to stop the progress of the father’s illness.The documentary competition features the latest works by some of the biggest names in Israeli documentary cinema, including Barak Heymann, Dror Moreh, Tali Shemesh and Asaf Sudri and Ran Tal.
