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

Israeli filmmakers Edna and Elinor Kowarsky once thought that they would never be able to reach U.S. audiences with their films.

In 1989, they formed their production company, Eden Productions, to make films about social issues in the Middle East. While their company grew to become a leading source of documentary content in Israel, working with the top directors in the region to get their films broadcast in Israeli and in European markets, the U.S. audience remained elusive.

“Americans are only interested to see films about themselves,” was one of the warnings Edna heard much too often from broadcasters and funders in other parts of the world. “They won’t watch a film in a foreign language” was another. But then they discovered ITVS International.

The mother-daughter team learned of International Call, ITVS’s fund for international documentary filmmakers, at a co-production forum in Tel Aviv where they met Vice President of Programming Claire Aguilar. At first, the Kowarskys were skeptical that their projects would be competitive, especially because they were mostly in Hebrew and Arabic. Nonetheless, in 2007, they submitted a project proposal to International Call requesting completion funds for the film SEEDS OF SUMMER.

A production with first-time director Hen Lasker, this verité film follows a group of young women during one of the most rigorous combat courses in the Israeli army over the course of 66 days and nights. It was the first time that the Israeli military allowed any filmmaker such intimate access to female soldiers. The peer review panel for ITVS International chose this project in part because the story speaks in a very personal way to universal themes of coming of age and living under constant threat of war.

“Although we tell a local story, the girl’s difficulties, their conflicts and their personal dilemmas are easy to identify with,” says Edna.

Not only did the Kowarskys receive the money they needed to finish the film, but they also formed a creative relationship with the ITVS International team, which helped them navigate the U.S. marketplace to find a home for the program on cablecaster The Documentary Channel. (SEEDS OF SUMMER aired nationally on January 12.)

“ITVS made it possible for us to produce our film and made it possible for U.S. viewers to widen their perspective and be exposed to a reality so distant from them, yet so very close,” remarked Edna.

Interested in watching this film? It is now available to watch online through our digital partners Caachi and Jaman.

Download to own on Caachi >>

Visit Jaman to rent online >>

Check out the video preview below: