The Haifa International Film Festival will celebrate its 40th anniversary starting on December 31 and running until January 11 with a huge celebration of cinema at the Haifa Cinematheque and many other theaters around the city.
The festival is traditionally held during the Sukkot holiday, but this year it was delayed due to the war. However, the always enjoyable event will be even more festive than usual this year because it coincides with the winter holiday season and will include a special day of opening events, starting in the afternoon and going until the wee hours, including parties featuring hot wine and live music.
The opening will start with the lighting of Hanukkah candles, which will be followed by several special screenings, including a sing-along version of the popular musical Wicked; Better Man, a docudrama about Robbie Williams; and, late in the evening, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, where the audience is encouraged to come in costume, to be followed by an alternative rock music party.
There will also be a screening of the much-awaited film Saturday Night, about the early days of the legendary Saturday Night Live comedy show, which stars Gabriel LaBelle of The Fabelmans as the show’s producer, Lorne Michaels. For the full program of the festival, including the opening events, and to buy tickets, go to the festival website at haifaff.co.il.
This year’s guest of honor is Michel Hazanavicius, the Oscar-winning director of The Artist, whose latest film, the animated The Most Precious of Cargoes, will be shown. The movie, which was in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival, is set during the Holocaust and tells the story of a rural couple who adopt a Jewish foundling.
The official opening film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, by Iranian dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof, will be shown on January 2. It’s a psychological thriller about how a Tehran judge begins to suspect his wife and daughters are involved in the protest movement.
Rasoulof was pressured by the government of Iran to withdraw it from the Cannes Film Festival, where it won five awards, including the Special Jury Prize. When he refused to comply, he was arrested and sentenced to a lengthy prison term as well as flogging, but he managed to flee the country and now lives in Europe.
The closing night film will be Nir Bergman’s Pink Lady, which won the Best Director award at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival last month. It tells the story of an ultra-Orthodox couple who are blackmailed by someone who threatens to reveal that the husband is gay.
THIS YEAR, the feature films in the Israeli competition will include Life Without Credit, the latest movie by Tom Shoval, which tells the story of a turbulent woman searching for a relative who is her legal guardian. Shoval is best known for Youth, which starred David Cunio, an actor still held hostage in Gaza.
Anat Malz’s Real Estate is about a couple who discover some truths about their relationship when they are forced to leave their beloved Tel Aviv and search for an apartment in Haifa.
Lee Gilat is known for writing Tehran, and her latest feature film is Girls Like Us, a love story set in an institution for at-risk youth.
Sophie Artus’s Halisa stars Noa Koler (Checkout) as a childless nurse who becomes close to a distressed young mother.
Veronica Kedar’s Day Trippers tells the story of a rebellious British teen and a runaway Israeli bride who meet up in Amsterdam and form an unlikely bond.
The Israeli documentaries include Outsider. Freud by Yair Qedar, who has made documentaries about great writers and cultural icons including Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and Spinoza. His Freud documentary is an inventive film, both narratively and visually, that highlights Freud’s background and breakthroughs.
Kafka’s Last Trial by Eliran Peled tells the story of the tortuous journey of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts, which ends in a trial to which the adjective Kafkaesque applies.
Nitsan Tal’s My Missing Screw follows the journey of a man with mental health issues who travels the world to try to reinvent himself.
Israeli director Savi Gabizon’s English remake of his Israeli film Longing, which stars Richard Gere as a man who learns late in life that he had a son, will be shown at the festival.
Eran Riklis’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is an adaptation of the bestselling memoir about a group of women who gather in that city to read literature forbidden by the regime.
The international competitions include the Golden Anchor Competition and the Carmel International Competition. Among the highly anticipated international films will be Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, about a Brazilian family in turmoil in the 1970s when the father disappears after he is interrogated by the regime. The film stars Fernanda Montenegro, who was in Salles’s acclaimed 1998 film, Central Station.
Two dramas tell the story of French icons. Being Maria, directed by Jessica Palud, is about Maria Schneider and the making of Last Tango in Paris, with Matt Dillon as Marlon Brando. Monsieur Aznavour stars Tahar Rahim as the great French-Armenian crooner whose family hid Jews during the Holocaust.
Gia Coppola is the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola, so it’s no surprise that she is a director, and her latest film, The Last Showgirl, will have its Israeli premiere in the festival. It stars Pamela Anderson as a Las Vegas showgirl who tries to repair her relationship with her daughter after the show she is in closes.
Other international films will include Edward Berger’s The Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci, about the selection of a new pope; Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, about cousins visiting Warsaw to honor the memory of their late grandmother; September 5, which tells the fact-based story of how an American sports broadcasting team ended up covering the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics; and The Brutalist, by Brady Corbet, which stars Adrien Brody as a pioneering Hungarian architect.
Among the international documentaries will be Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story; Miyazaki, Spirit of Nature; and Riefenstahl, a new look at what Hitler’s favorite filmmaker really knew about the Holocaust.
The Haifa Classics section includes a tribute to the Taviani brothers, with several of their films, among them Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars.
If you would like to take your children to some films you won’t find at the multiplex, you can see a number of recent kids’ movies, most of them animated, including Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Shinnosuke Yakuwa, the story of a lively child at a new school as Japan descends into war.
There will also be a section on Culinary Cinema and recent animated movies for older audiences.
Some of these films will open eventually at theaters, but many can only be seen at the festival, and there really is something special about watching movies in this joyous atmosphere.
The festival’s artistic director is Yaron Shamir, the director of the Haifa Cinematheque.