The 26th Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival, Tel Aviv’s most exciting film festival, will take place this year August 14 to 20 at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and other locations around the city. It will showcase the best student films from Israel and around the world, along with some stellar guests.
First and foremost, it is a festival that spotlights student films and encourages film students. There will be a number of pitching events that connect creators with producers, as well as competitions for International Student Films, Israeli Films, Independents, Video and Experimental Art, and International Digital Media, which offer exposure and significant cash prizes.
Israeli film students have faced an especially difficult year. Many are juggling military reserve duty with their studies and have faced the loss of those closest to them in the October 7 massacre and the ensuing war, so the celebration of their work is especially welcome this year. The festival, managed by film students at Tel Aviv University’s Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, is considered one of the most important in the world for student films and short films.
The festival normally takes place in June, but this year, it was moved to August because the academic year was delayed due to the war. Several films will tackle war-related issues, while other events will honor those who lost their lives, such as director Yahav Winner, killed in Kfar Aza, and former student Maya Foder, murdered at the Nova Music Festival.
The program includes a photo exhibit named Home is Not Here? It is the result of several photography workshops for evacuees from the Gaza border region, depicting their lives post-October 7. A panel discussion, “Is the Personal Political: Regarding the Personal During National Crisis?” will focus on filmmaking in the aftermath of October 7 and feature participants in the “Unfathomable Cinema Project,” which seeks to foster in-depth discussion on the role of movies in Israel today.
Many of the Israeli films feature top Israeli actors, such as Suzanna Papian, who appears in Rita Borodiyanski’s Time Out, as a soldier at an IDF checkpoint. Marc Grey’s Life Hacks for Lovers stars former Batsheva dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, who have become celebrated international choreographers. Other well-known Israeli actors taking part in the festival include Ala Dakka, Shlomo Bar-Aba, Dana Ivgy, Liat Harlev, and Leib Lev Levin. Amit Vaknin’s It’s Not Time for Pop, which competed in the Cannes Film Festival, will also be part of the Israeli competition.
Films from many countries
More than 100 short films from 20 countries, including Ukraine, Mexico, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Burkina Faso, as well as Israel, will participate in the festival competitions this year. A number of films made by refugees from the Ukraine-Russia war will participate in the international competition, including Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi’s Waking Up in Silence, which tells the story of Ukrainian children living in a German military barracks, which won the Grand Prix at the Kyiv International Short Film Festival.
Among this year’s guests will be acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter, director, and playwright David Mamet, whose plays and movies include Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, House of Games, Homicide, and Heist. He is the definition of a mensch, showing up at film festivals in Israel whenever the going gets tough; he was a guest at the Jerusalem Film Festival at the height of the Second Intifada in 2002 and again in 2014, during the war with Gaza. Few seem to remember it now, but that year, the festival’s opening outdoor ceremony was canceled due to Hamas bombardments. A tribute to him and his films, several of which will be shown, including State and Main, one of the funniest and, I imagine, truest movies about filmmaking, will take place. It features several of his go-to actors, among them his wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, as well as William H. Macy and Ricky Jay. House of Games, starring Mamet’s first wife, Lindsay Crouse, will also be shown, and its story of a repressed psychiatrist drawn into a world of gamblers and conmen features some of the best dialogue ever put on film; it is a must for any aspiring screenwriter. Mamet will also give a master class.
Pidgeon, an actress who trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and had an extensive stage career, as well as a career as a singer, will participate in a conversation on “Actors on Actors” with Laliv Sivan. She has appeared in Red, Bird Box, and The Divergent Series: Allegiant, in addition to a number of films by Mamet.
ONE OF the most critical skills for young directors to master is editing, and editor Juliette Welfling, one of the top in Europe and the US, will be another guest of honor at the festival, where she will give a master class. Welfling moves back and forth between arthouse films and Hollywood blockbusters such as The Hunger Games and Ocean’s Eight. She was the editor of Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, which won the Jury Prize and the Best Actress Award at Cannes this year. Two movies she edited and directed, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet, will also be shown.
Ugandan director/screenwriter/producer Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey Nabwana (aka Nabwana I.G.G.), best-known for Who Killed Captain Alex?, will be a guest of honor. Known as the Tarantino of Uganda, he established a studio in a Kampala slum known as Wakaliwood, churning out low-budget action films, often costing around $200, many of which are celebrated for their cinematic qualities. Nabwana co-creates his films with his wife, Harriet Nabwana, who is also a guest of honor, and the two will jointly give a master class. Their 2019 film Boda Boda Killer, which has been called a Ugandan version of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, will be screened.
The two opening-night films will be short films that won the previous pitching competition: Roy Kanievsky’s live-action The Guard and Uri Gold’s animated film Glug. Actor Yossi Marshek will host the opening ceremony.
Festival directors Ori Arthur Wolf and Gal Ostrinsky said in a statement: “We hope that the festival will give strength to our audience in these difficult times, and we wish for the immediate return of all the abductees and the end of the war.”
For the full program, go to: https://www.taufilmfest.com/?lang=en