Since its inception in 1999, DocAviv has become one of the leading cultural events in Israel with the aim of promoting Israeli and international documentary film. ITVS’s Claire Aguilar attended the 2012 DocAviv International Film Festival May 3-12, as a juror for Israeli Competition.

Over the last 10 years, Israel has become one of the leading sources of independently-produced documentary films.  There is a dizzying abundance of documentary films and filmmakers in Israel — and not only are there many, they have also been successful: showcased in international festivals, sold to broadcasters in Israel and in the U.S. and Europe, winning prizes and garnering international press.  It has been amazing to witness the growth of strong, innovative, and diverse Israeli films — covering subjects that you would expect to see from Israeli filmmakers, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict — but also covering the personal and global experience, films about family, identity, and culture, with other films covering globalization, immigration, and homophobia.

I heard from one filmmaker that there are at least 20 film schools in Israel, and that is mostly counting only Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.  The community of documentary filmmakers is intimate, diverse, and full of talent — and here at ITVS, we have been fortunate to work with many Israeli filmmakers over the past eight years and have showcased them on U.S. public television: Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, Dalit Kimor’s Pickles, Inc., Yoav Shamir’s Flipping Out, Ran Tal’s The Children of the Sun, Nati Baratz’s Unmistaken Child, Ruthie Shatz, and Adi Baratz’s The Collaborator and His Family, and many others.

So it was a great honor for me to be invited to this year’s DocAviv as a juror for Israeli Competition. DocAviv is Tel Aviv’s largest film festival and is dedicated exclusively to documentary cinema — since 1999, it has showcased documentaries from Israel and around the world. The films are screened in the newly remodeled Tel Aviv Cinematheque, but there were also many open-air screenings in the beautiful Port of Tel Aviv.

Sinai Abt, the artistic director of DocAviv, was the first broadcaster on-board with the iconic animated documentary Waltz with Bashir when he was the commissioning editor at Israel’s Channel 8. He and his team selected 12 films to compete for the Best Israeli Documentary and he also asked our jury to select the award winners for Best Debut Film, Special Jury Mention, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Research Award.  I had a wonderful jury team, including Asako Fujioka from the Yamagata Film Festival, filmmaker Sivan Arbel, cinematographer Itzik Portal, and Executive Producer for Films Transit Diana Holtzberg.

We gave the awards to the following films:

Best Israeli Film Award:  Home Movie (Dir. Reuven Brodsky)
Special Jury Mention:  The Invisible Men (Dir. Yariv Moser)
Mayor of Tel Aviv-Yafo Award for Debut Film:  Powder (Dir. Ayal Goldberg)
Best Cinematography Award:  Home Movie (Cinematography by Reuven Brodsky and Itamar Mendes-Flor)
Best Editing Award:  Powder (Editing by Erez Laufer, Ayal Goldberg)
Best Research Award: One Day After Peace  (Dirs. Mimi Laufer, Erez Laufer)

What is it really like to live in Jerusalem? Promises offers touching and fresh insight into the Middle East conflict when filmmakers Justine Shapiro, B. Z. Goldberg, and Carlos Bolado travel to this complex and charged city to see what seven children — Palestinian and Israeli — think about war, peace, and just growing up.

Living within 20 minutes of each other, these children are nevertheless locked in separate worlds. Through candid interviews, the film explores a legacy of distrust and bitterness, but signs of hope emerge when some of the children dare to cross the checkpoints to meet one another.

In honor of Independence Day, Global Voices and the WORLD Channel present four international documentaries throughout the month of July that focus on the different, difficult actions people and organizations have taken in the fight for independence.

The month begins with Storm of Emotions (July 3rd at 10 PM), chronicling the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the efforts to achieve democracy amidst great social and political turmoil. Read more about the Global Voices line up after the jump >>

July continues with the two-part documentary Cuba, An African Odyssey (July 10 and 17 at 10PM), showcasing the previously untold story of Cuba’s support for African revolutions. The Mosquito Problem & Other Stories (July 24 at 10PM) follows and focuses on one village as it is continuously transformed by ideologies, regimes, and dreams of economic prosperity. The month concludes with The Siege (July 31 at 10 PM), a documentary about a historic event in 1996 when the Peruvian Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement seized the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima and held dozens of foreign diplomats hostage for 126 days.

All four documentaries will be broadcast on Sunday nights at 10 PM on the WORLD Channel.  Find a comprehensive overview of the 2011 series and a calendar of online events on the WORLD Channel’s website.

Shadya airs on Global Voices Sunday, July 25

A young Muslim Israeli is trapped between her passion for karate and religious tradition in Shadya, airing this Sunday on Global Voices on PBS World (check local listings).

Directed by Roy Westler, the film takes place in Northern Israel and profiles a 17-year-old charismatic karate champion. Shadya is a rare breed, a feminist in a male-dominated culture and a Muslim Arab living in Israel.

As she grapples with the looming tension of an early marriage and her Palestinian identity, Shadya refuses to play by the rules of her traditional Muslim community.

Check out the trailer for Shadya ahead of the broadcast this Sunday.

Filmmaker Yun Jong Suh

Filmmaker Yun Jong Suh discusses how she came to make a film about the only gay bar in Jerusalem. Her film, City of Borders, airs on public television this month. Check listings in your area here.

As a Buddhist Korean American, I am frequently asked why I am interested in the Middle East and how I discovered Shushan, Jerusalem’s only gay bar. I’m not the most obvious candidate to tell this story. But I believe my outsider status proved to be instrumental in making City of Borders.

I’m drawn to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because I intimately relate to both sides of the war. Like the Israelis, I grew up in constant fear of my neighboring country, North Korea, attacking my small village in South Korea. I did not see North Koreans as humans but as demons determined to kill us if they had the chance. My childhood playtime often involved devising escape routes and places to hide in my home if North Koreans ever invaded.

Like the Palestinians, I understand the horrors and hardships of living under occupation through my parents who survived the Japanese colonization of Korea. Being on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza, I also witnessed the impact of the Israeli occupation.

The concept for my documentary began in 2002 while I was producing a series of radio reports in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip on the clashes during the Second Intifada. During the height of the clashes in 2002, I heard about a bar that hosted gay nights where Israelis and Palestinians took great risks to meet and connect as human beings amid all the distrust, death, and violence. This gathering was beyond my imagination and renewed my faith in our shared humanity and desire to connect.

The story stayed with me as news coverage increasingly focused on fundamentalists on both sides of the conflict, thereby providing no hope for a peaceful resolution and coexistence in the future. In 2006, I contacted the bar owner, Sa’ar Netanel, who is considered the Harvey Milk of Jerusalem in that he is the first openly gay elected politician in the Holy City. He was easy to find since his phone numbers were printed in posters all over the religious district in Jerusalem, claiming that Sa’ar was responsible for AIDS, earthquakes, and other natural disasters hitting Israel so everyone should call him. So I called him to understand his great powers to cause such chaos. He invited me to come to Jerusalem and see with my own eyes the people who gathered at his bar nightly: A gay Israeli soldier sitting next to a Palestinian man, who would be sitting next to an ultra-Orthodox woman, who may be dancing next to a straight couple.

Sa’ar’s vision for his bar where people from different worlds can find common ground and be accepted, mirrors my purpose for working in the media. Therefore, I chose this community, whom we rarely hear from in the region, as the topic of my first feature-length documentary despite daunting barriers of budget, bombs, language, and culture.

Whenever I would hit an obstacle in making City of Borders, I would think about Sa’ar receiving more than 300 death threats and draw on his courage. After three adventurous years of production, I’m very excited to share the vibrant, inspiring and courageous community at Shushan with the world.

— Yun Jong Suh

At the core of ITVS’s mission is to amplify the voices of the underrepresented in traditional media. In June, we get to celebrate the films airing this month across the nation, as well as those in our catalog that tell the rarely heard stories from the gay, lesbian, and transgendered communities.

This month, a remarkable film – City of Borders – airs on various PBS stations (check listings here). The film documents an astounding array of regulars at Jerusalem’s only gay bar. Palestinians (some who must sneak over Israel’s “security fence” to get there) mingle with Israelis, Muslims with Jews, men with women, gay people with straight people. It’s a stunning microcosm of peace and shared humanity amidst a landscape rent with conflict.

But also take a moment to browse through our film catalog’s sortable search engine for all of our films on LGBT topics.

Among them, notably, given recent news, is Ask Not, a film about the United States military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy that systematically bars gays and lesbians from serving openly in the armed forces. Now that repeal of DADT has been passed in both houses of Congress, there’s hope that this film is about to become an archival document of a sad time gone by.

In the 1920s and 30s, tens of thousands of children were born on an Israeli kibbutz and raised as part of a social experiment to create a new and improved human. The film traces the “Children of the Sun” from their birth through their growth as members of the Zionist elite and to the crisis that weakened the kibbutz movement.

Watch a preview below:

CHILDREN OF THE SUN airs tonight, July 20, at 9:00 PM on the Sundance Channel (check local listings).

Director Ran Tal recently discussed how he became interested in the topic on Beyond the Box Blog.
Read his Q&A >>

Ran Tal, director of CHILDREN OF THE SUN.

Director Ran Tal was born in Israel to a farmer’s family and grew up on Kibbutz Beit Hashita. In his latest film CHILDREN OF THE SUN, airing Monday, July 20 at 9:00 PM on the Sundance Channel, Tal traces Israel’s kibbutz movement and follows members of the Zionist elite from their birth in the 1920s and ‘30s to the crisis that weakened the movement. Appearing at film festivals across the country, Tal discussed his personal connection to the subject. Check out his Q&A from the San Francisco International Film Festival and learn more about how the audience reacted in Israel, the research process and why he made the film.

Why did you decide to focus your film on a family in the kibbutz?
I understood that the story of the kibbutz might be very big. But I really thought that to focus on these small intimate things, on this radical alternative family of the kibbutz, would be a good chance to tell a story that is very intimate, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, would be a big one. I really believe in intimate cinema, instead of the cinema that tries to put everything together and ends up not catching anything.

Read the full interview >>

Watch a preview >>

SEEDS OF SUMMER: At an army base in the heart of Israel’s southern desert, two young female military recruits make the transformation from fragile, vulnerable young girls to confident soldiers and fierce fighters.

Download SEEDS OF SUMMER >>

IRANIAN KIDNEY BARGAIN SALE: An inside look at the growing organ industry in Iran where every 10 minutes, a young person wishing to sell his or her kidney appears at the entrance of a kidney referral agency.

Download IRANIAN KIDNEY BARGAIN SALE >>

The 11th Israel Market for International Co-Productions.

I just participated in the 11th Israel Co-Production Forum in Tel Aviv. It was my fourth time at the Co-Pro and in Israel, and as always it was an inspiring and invigorating experience.

This was a special year for ITVS, where we were honored with a special tribute for films that we produced with Israeli producers as well as films presented by ITVS International through co-productions or acquisition. The tribute to ITVS opened with the film BE LIKE OTHERS, by Tanaz Eshaghian and Peter Wintonick, which explores transsexual counterculture in Iran. This unprecedented film explores the re-assignment of gender in a Muslim country, where sex-sex operations offer a cure for “diagnosed transsexuals.” In Israel, there obviously is interest in Iran on all levels, and this film offered insight into an intimate part of the culture. Nine other films were featured in the ITVS tribute including ON THE BORDERS OF DESPERATION, STORM OF EMOTIONS, YOUNG YAKUZA, PICKLES, INC. and UNMISTAKEN CHILD. These films will tour in cinematheques across Israel.

The tribute to ITVS was a great kick-off for the Co-Production Forum, which presented its 11th edition of 27 co-productions from Israeli producers in the development and production stage. This is one of the finest co-production forums in existence, helmed with insight and dedication by Orna Yarmut and her talented team, and superbly moderated by Pat Ferns, the father of the documentary public pitch, which he launched 35 years ago at the Banff Film Festival. The Co-Pro assembles the projects and their producers and presents them to a 15-member panel of commissioning editors and broadcasters from all over the world, including Jean Pelletier (CBC-Télévision Radio-Canada), DRTV (Denmark), Iikka Vehkalahti (YLE, Finland), Alax Szalat and Marianne Lévy-Leblond (Arte France), Nick Fraser (BBC Storyville), Hans-Robert Eisenhauer (ZDF/Arte, Germany), Mette Hoffman-Meyer (DR, Denmark) and many others.

Each year the projects pitched are informative and thought-provoking, offering a range of points of view of many subjects, and not only about the Middle East conflict.

In the past 15 years, Israel has produced a striking number of excellent documentary producers including Yulie Cohen (My Terrorist), Yoav Shamir (Checkpoint) and Ari Folman (WALTZ WITH BASHIR). Ari Folman’s project WALTZ WITH BASHIR was one of the first Israeli projects that I commissioned through ITVS International during my first visit to Israel. Simply based on an innovative idea and a single animated scene and aptly pitched from Folman, who had limited documentary experience, it was clear that this film would be original and historic.

This Co-Pro contained veteran and new producers, and covered subjects as diverse as: a look at Dead Sea as it dries up and collapses; a Polish priest who discovers that he is actually born to Jewish parents and decides to return to Israel; sales agents peddling weapons and technologies for urban warfare; multicultural and multi-religious 8-years olds in a classroom in Tel Aviv, Russian neo-Nazis and their dreams of ethnic cleansing.

In two days I heard a wide and dizzying array of subjects, approaches, filmmaking styles and sometimes personal confessions! After the seven-minute verbal pitch for each presentation, we watched video samples and gave critiques and feedback, and sometimes there was a pre-buy commitment from a broadcaster.

The Co-Pro also organized a German delegation pitching to Israeli broadcasters, and presented a sampling of 360 multi-platform projects that were included in our mix of creative documentaries and social issues. An enriching experience, and hopefully we can return with more great projects from this country and creative talent pool.

“Toda raba” to Dror Moreh for his saavy technical assistance (card reader)…

- Claire
ITVS Vice President of Programming