Haifa International Film Festival brings celebrated cinema and classics to the Carmel

The 42nd Haifa International Film Festival will bring the most celebrated movies from the world’s major festivals to Haifa alongside new Israeli films, documentaries, genre movies, and classics. Originally scheduled for September 26 to October 3 during Sukkot, the organizers added an extra day of screenings on September 25 due to demand.

The festival will open with the Israeli premiere of Avi Nesher’s Our Loves, fresh from its warmly received world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. Nesher will also receive the Haifa festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award for cinematic excellence and his contribution to Israeli culture at the opening-night ceremony, hosted by Lior Ashkenazi.

Our Loves’ narrative begins on October 6, 2023, focusing on several characters who think they are having the worst day of their lives, and blends drama, romance, and comedy as they cope with a situation worse than their worst nightmares.

Artistic director Yaron Shamir has made sure that the international program is extremely strong, featuring many of the most talked-about movies of the year. Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and Slumdog Millionaire, has made a movie set in the cutthroat world of UK tabloid journalism with Ink. The film, which opened the Venice Film Festival, is set in 1969 and dramatizes the transformation of Britain’s Sun newspaper under Rupert Murdoch, played by Guy Pearce.

Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin spotlights a different kind of political history, starring Paul Dano as Vadim Baranov, an artist and television producer who becomes a political strategist for a rising Vladimir Putin, played by Jude Law. Based on Giuliano da Empoli’s novel, it follows the creation of the political mythology surrounding the Russian leader.

For viewers who would rather escape politics altogether, Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss, which opened Cannes this year, offers a Parisian romantic comedy set in 1928 about a grieving painter, a fake psychic, and a series of fraudulent séances.

If you have enjoyed eating Hershey bars, you can now learn the story of the founder of the iconic chocolate company in Hershey: Mark Waters’s biopic about Milton Hershey. Finn Wittrock plays the famous chocolatier, with Alexandra Daddario (who may be the next on-screen Wonder Woman) as his wife.

The Panorama section includes All About Corinne, Marc Fitoussi’s comedy starring Isabelle Huppert as Corinne, an eternal movie extra who dreams of finally getting a substantial role. When she befriends a famous actress, played by Sandrine Kiberlain, she sees a possible route into the inner circle of French cinema. The supporting cast includes Diane Kruger, Anne Marivin, and Emmanuelle Bercot.

Romanian director Tudor Giurgiu’s 3 Days in September tells the story of a heroine whose wedding is wrecked when her fiancé’s mistress appears, sending her fleeing aboard a train and into an all-night journey through an off-season seaside resort. It features a single take lasting more than an hour and shifts between comedy and drama.

Everyone who loves the Big Apple will want to see The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, directed by Noah Segan and starring John Turturro as Harry, an old-school thief trying to survive in the digital age. Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito, and Tatiana Maslany co-star in what is both a crime story and a lament for a city that is changing faster than many of its residents can handle.

Another very different American story is told in The Weight, Padraic McKinley’s Depression-era thriller. Ethan Hawke plays a prisoner offered a chance at freedom by a warden, played by Russell Crowe, if he will help smuggle stolen gold from a remote mine.

One of the most important titles in the Carmel International Competition this year is Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur. The director of Leviathan and Loveless focuses on a successful Russian businessman whose orderly existence begins collapsing in 2022 amid professional, personal, and political pressures. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and additional Haifa screenings have already been added to meet demand.

Also in the competition is François Ozon’s The Stranger, a new adaptation of Albert Camus’s classic novel. Set in French-colonial Algeria in 1938 and starring Benjamin Voisin as Meursault, the film returns to Camus’s story of alienation, murder, and the absurd while giving particular visual weight to the North African setting that forms the novel’s background.

A highlight of the festival will be the Israeli Cinema section, which features Marco Carmel’s much-anticipated Double Panther, based on the true story of Yaakov Elbaz, a criminal recruited by the police to infiltrate the Israeli Black Panthers, a political group that fought for the rights of Mizrahi Jews.

Many Waters, written and directed by Imri Matalon, features Lihi Kornowski as a young woman who is paralyzed after an accident in the sea and meets Yosef, played by Alaa Daka, an aide at the rehabilitation center where she receives treatment. An intimate relationship develops between them, but outside pressures threaten it.

The leading director, Nitzan Gilady, passed away earlier this year; his final film, Thou Shalt Love, will be shown. It stars Yael Elkana as Naomi, a  28-year-old haredi (ultra-Orthodox) yoga teacher whose marriage is thrown into crisis when she discovers why her husband failed to appear at an important meeting with their rabbi. Michael Moshonov and Lena Fraifeld co-star.

Tomer Heymann is one of Israel’s most celebrated documentary filmmakers, and his latest film, I Want to Tell My Story, has an unusual approach to Holocaust history. As Shimon Rothschild approaches his 100th birthday, he reconstructs his own life on a studio set, directing actors portraying relatives who were murdered and restaging episodes including Auschwitz, medical experiments at Sachsenhausen, a death march, and his life after the war. Rather than simply recounting his memories, Rothschild becomes, in effect, the director, which floods him with conflicting emotions.

Uri Levi’s documentary Peace 2030 follows Maoz Inon, whose parents were killed on October 7, and Aziz Abu-Sarah, a Palestinian from Jerusalem who has suffered his own family loss. Together, they embark on an ambitious campaign the achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace by 2030.

Among the Haifa Docs selections is Boaz Dvir’s To Kill a Nazi, an investigation into the extraordinary story of Michel Cojot, a French Jew who sought the truth about his father’s murder at Auschwitz. His pursuit eventually led him to Klaus Barbie in Bolivia and unexpectedly connected him to the events surrounding the Entebbe rescue operation. Jason Alexander of Seinfeld narrates.

Music lovers will want to see Broken English, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s documentary about iconic singer Marianne Faithfull. Made with Faithfull’s participation, it looks back at a six-decade career defined as much by survival and reinvention as by music.

A special Japanese cinema program, From Mishima to Oshima, includes Paul Schrader’s typically unconventional 1985 movie, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Schrader weaves the final day in writer Yukio Mishima’s life with flashbacks and highly stylized dramatizations of his fiction, accompanied by a score by Philip Glass.

The program also includes Kon Ichikawa’s 1958 Conflagration, adapted from Mishima’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Its story of an alienated young man whose obsession with the purity and beauty of a Kyoto temple takes a destructive turn remains one of the landmarks of postwar Japanese cinema and literature.

Haifa’s Wildest Nights section offers Hille Norden’s German film Easy Girl, about Nore, an uninhibited young woman who befriends a medical student and gradually reveals her dark past.

The Streisand tribute will include William Wyler’s Funny Girl, the 1968 film that gave Streisand her first movie role, and an Oscar, for her portrayal of vaudeville and Broadway star Fanny Brice, a movie that holds up remarkably well, and features Omar Sharif as her husband, Jewish gambler Nick Arnstein; Gene Kelly’s lavish 1969 musical Hello, Dolly!; and Frank Pierson’s 1976 version of A Star Is Born, in which Streisand stars opposite Kris Kristofferson, with a screenplay by the director and acclaimed authors Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.

For more information, go to the website at www.haifaff.co.il/