The banality of evil has itself become a banality. A recent biography of Otto Adolf Eichmann by Bettina Stangneth has rekindled the debate over Hannah Arendt’s portrait of the Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer, logistician, and executor of the Final Solution as an apathetic, bureaucratic functionary “who never realized what he was doing.” David Perlov’s sober and poignant documentary...
A modern-day Shakespearean tale about a famous Tajik musical family, controlled by the charismatic, funny yet overbearing patriarch, Papa Alaev, who at the age of 80 is starting to lose his grip on the 'family business', sending them on a rigid and unsure transition from Monarchy to Democracy.
Can a house be a metaphor for Arab-Jewish relations in Israel Amos Gitai returns to the house in West Jerusalem he profiled in 1980. He interviews members of the Jewish families who live there, and he talks with the Arab family who lived in the house until 1948. They are now in East Jerusalem and pay a nearly furtive visit to the street in front of their old house. Gitai also ...
An Arab man marries a Jewish woman. They give birth to a girl and a boy and live in quiet harmony within the Arab-Jewish community. Nobody realizes that behind dozens of mysterious terror attacks which shake the State of Israel in the late 1960s stands no other than the Arab father. When he is caught, his Jewish wife and kids become "the family members of an Arab terrorist." Th...
Law permits the Israeli army to enter Palestinian homes at any time. They do not have to say why they search an apartment in the middle of the night. Law permits Palestinians to film these actions and the army is not allowed to forbid it. On this particular night, relations are altered due to the presence of an active camera.(Berlinale 2014)
A group of young immigrants from Soviet Union live in a provincial Israeli town. In their new homeland the only person who follows them closely is the local policeman, family ties are wearing out day by day, and they do everything to mess their lives up, transforming their anxiety to get a new social standing in violence and robbery. Will they be able to build a soccer team and...
The film has no narrator or guide and consists only of interviews with the inhabitants of Jenin edited by the producer.
Bob Dylan sang it. Elvis, too. And that’s only the beginning when it comes to “Hava Nagila”. Follow the infectious party song on its fascinating journey from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the cul-de‐sacs of America in this hilarious and surprisingly deep film. Featuring interviews with Harry Belafonte, Connie Francis, Glen Campbell, Leonard Nimoy, Regina Spektor and more, Ha...