Lihi Kornowski, best known for the series Losing Alice on Apple TV+ and Who Died? on Yes, will star in a new thriller by Emil Ben-Shimon about the Six Day War, Jerusalem ‘67, Deadline.com reported on Tuesday.
Kornowski will play Sarah, a woman living in Jerusalem who finds herself on the war’s front lines. The summary of the film on the Internet Movie Database reads: “In Jerusalem during the Six Day War, a young civilian woman leaves her family to serve her country; a man who abhors war must fight within sight of his home; while paratroopers are dispatched to the city for a battle they never trained for.”
Kornowski told Deadline, “It is a challenge and a great honor for me to play Sarah in Jerusalem ‘67, a period drama that takes place in Jerusalem during the dramatic and difficult time of the Six Day War. It feels like a mission to tell this story from a female point of view, because there was and still is a tendency to forget the heroines of this period.”
Ben-Shimon’s feature film The Women’s Balcony, about a group of women in Jerusalem’s Bukharan Quarter who rebel when a new rabbi orders that their neighborhood synagogue be rebuilt without a women’s section, was a huge critical and commercial hit in Israel and around the world. It was recently spun off into a television series starring Tsahi Halevi along with the original cast, which is currently running on Keshet.
Producer Joseph Schick said in a statement to Deadline, “We are excited to tell the story of the Six Day War from the point of view of a family in Jerusalem facing an existential threat. Emil Ben-Shimon is a master at storytelling that moves audiences everywhere, and brings to life our vision for a Jerusalem story that is epic and personal. Lihi Kornowski is the newest brilliant young actress to emerge from Israel, and her tremendous range and versatility are perfect for a lead character who is courageous, haunted and flawed.”
Kornowski has a role in Eytan Fox’s upcoming film, Sublet, which is set for release in Israel in June.
Schick produces with Jacob Septimus and Matthew Hiltzik. EPs are Dafna Prenner and Shai Eines of Artza Productions, which recently finished shooting The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, an epic family drama that spans the period from early in the 20th century to the Independence War and its aftermath.
In spite of the huge impact that the Six Day War had on Israel, few movies have dramatized it. The best known film about the war, Rafi Bukai’s 1986 film, Avanti Popolo, looked at the war from the point of view of two Egyptian soldiers trapped behind Israeli lines, a very different perspective from Jerusalem ‘67.