The Haifa International Film Festival has announced its Israeli lineup for its 42nd edition, which will take place during Sukkot from September 26 through October 3.
Twelve diverse movies highlight the variety of Israeli cinema, exploring war, peace, the arts, and much more. They will compete in the main Israeli film competition. There will also be premieres, documentaries on major cultural figures, special events, and a short-film competition.
This year, seven narrative features and five documentaries will compete together in the Israeli competition, an innovation introduced by the festival’s artistic director, Yaron Shamir, who believes that different types of films should be presented in a single program.
Documentary by acclaimed Israeli director to be featured
Among the documentaries is a new film from one of Israel’s most acclaimed and prolific documentary directors, Tomer Heymann.
The film, I Want to Tell My Story, is about Shimon Rothschild, who, approaching his 100th birthday, reconstructs his extraordinary life with Heymann on a specially built studio set. Rothschild directs actors portraying members of his family who were murdered in the Holocaust, as he revisits his survival of Auschwitz, medical experiments at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, a death march, and his life after the war.
Groundbreaking Ethiopian-Israeli director Samuel Beru’s narrative feature Hager (Land) is set in Ethiopia in 1973 and tells the story of a Jewish family preparing for the dangerous journey toward Israel through Sudan.
The family patriarch, Yitzhak, initially refuses to abandon the land and farm he has built, putting him at odds with his wife, who is determined to leave with their children.
Marco Carmel’s much-anticipated Double Panther is based on the true story of Yaakov Elbaz, a criminal planted as an informer inside Israel’s Mizrahi Black Panther movement, who gradually begins to identify with its members and their cause. Yaakov Zada Daniel of Fauda stars as Elbaz.
Reut Akkerman directs and stars in Stay! which is about an adopted woman whose biological mother dies just as she is rushing to see her.
The death brings her face-to-face with the family she has never known, including her biological father, a drug addict she has not seen since childhood, and forces her to confront conflicting identities and loyalties.
The late Nitzan Gilady’s Thou Shalt Love centers on a young ultra-Orthodox woman whose marriage is tested when she discovers why her husband was absent from a crucial meeting with their rabbi. Yael Elkana, Michael Moshonov, and Lena Fraifeld star in the film.
Gilady, who died this summer, won acclaim for both documentaries such as In Satmar Custody and feature films, including Wedding Doll.
Shiran Sharabany’s Spikes follows three childhood friends from a remote northern moshav who hitchhike toward a costume party in the desert and slowly realize their youthful bond may be nearing its end.
Manya Lozovsky’s Journey Dreams is a documentary about a mother and daughter who travel together through war-torn Ukraine.
Veteran director Dina Zvi Riklis returns with Blue Marks, based on Emilie Moatti’s best-selling novel.
The film stars Noa Ohayon, Yael Abecassis, and Lior Ashkenazi and follows Iris, the daughter of Tunisian immigrants, who leaves Netanya to study fashion in Paris. Her life changes after she is raped and becomes pregnant, setting her on a path toward revenge.
Festival to include drama films, documentaries
Other competition drama films include Farewell to Dough, Shimon Shai’s Jerusalem-set comedy-drama about a man thrown into an existential crisis when a medical diagnosis forces him to give up carbohydrates.
Documentaries reflect the divisions and traumas of contemporary Israel.
Children of Hebron, directed by Elad Goldberg with codirector Kerem Hamed Wilder, examines people who grew up amid violence in Hebron and asks how childhood in a conflict zone shaped the adults they became.
In A Place Called Hope, director Eitan Cohen travels through Israel with his young son during a ceasefire in search of the meaning of hope.
Uri Levi’s Peace 20 30 follows Maoz Inon, whose parents were killed on October 7, and who responds to his loss by becoming an activist for peace.
Outside of the competition, the festival will introduce several new Israeli films in premiere screenings, including Raanan Tessler’s Judoka, about a 17-year-old athlete who abandons his sports boarding school after a family crisis; Imri Matalon’s Many Waters, starring Lihi Kornowski and Ala Dakka, about a newly disabled woman who develops a relationship with a Palestinian orderly at a rehabilitation facility; and Michael Rozanov’s Negative, a genre-bending thriller set in an HIV testing clinic as political unrest rages outside.
Festival's new section to be dedicated to cultural figures
A new section devoted to Israeli cultural figures will feature documentaries about feminist pioneer Alice Shalvi, songwriter Naomi Shemer, and actor Chaim Topol.
The Topol documentary, Topol: Fiddler on Top of the World, directed by Alon Gur Arye, uses personal archives and drawings to examine the choices and missed opportunities that shaped the international star’s career.
Among the festival’s special events will be Yehoram and Gila, starring Gila Almagor and Yehoram Gaon as fictionalized versions of aging theatrical legends confronting career, memory, and mortality, as well as a screening and discussion of Amos Gitai’s The Road to Jericho.
The festival will open with Avi Nesher’s Our Loves, a film centered on seven characters who think they are having the worst day of their lives on October 6, 2023, only to have the events of October 7 transform their understanding of the past and future.
The ensemble cast includes Shalom Michaelshwilli, Maggie Azarzar, Yaniv Biton, Noa Cohen, Hadas Yaron, Evelin Hagoel, and newcomer Daniel Gimpel.
More details of the program will be posted on www.haifaff.co.il