By HANNAH BROWNSHADY SROUR’S ‘Holy Air.’(photo credit: DANIEL MILLER)
The 11th annual Other Israel Film Festival, which runs from November 2-9 at the JCC in Manhattan, will open with one of the biggest Israeli hits of the year, Maysaloun Hamoud’s In Between, the award-winning story of three Arab young women sharing an apartment in Tel Aviv. Hamoud is a festival guest.The festival, which is devoted to presenting high-quality cinema that inspires conversation and takes a deeper look into Israeli and Palestinian societies, as well as other minority populations in Israel, has one of its strongest line-ups ever this year.The closing-night film, Shady Srour’s Holy Air, is a movie the young Woody Allen might have made if he were a Christian Arab living in Nazareth.Srour will also be present at the screening.The festival includes feature films, documentaries and shorts, by both established and emerging filmmakers.Among the documentaries on the program is Muhi: Generally Temporary, by Rina Castelnuovo- Hollander and Tamir Elterman. This film tells the story of a young boy from Gaza who was taken to an Israeli hospital as an infant and has spent his entire life there with his grandfather.Carole Zabar, the festival founder, said in a statement, “The Other Israel Film Festival was founded to be a vehicle for cultural change and social insight into the nature of Israel as a democracy and into the complex condition of the lives of minorities living in the Jewish state.”The executive director of the festival is Isaac Zablocki, the director of film programs at JCC Manhattan and the director and co-founder of ReelAbilities: NY Disabilities Film Festival.He is also the founder and director of the Israel Film Center, which includes North America’s largest streaming site for Israeli films: IsraelFilmCenterSTREAM.org.
