Advanced search

Two women embark on a road trip after they are brought together by circumstance. Rebecca (Portman) flees her hotel after a fight with her mother-in-law (Maura) and hails a taxi driven by Hanna (Lazlo).

In May 1948, shortly before the creation of the State of Israel, hundreds of immigrants from across Europe arrive in Palestine--only to risk arrest by British troops.

A political drama centered around Israel's pullout from the occupied Gaza strip, in which a French woman of Israeli origin comes to the Gaza Strip to find her long ago abandoned daughter.

Slice-of-life look at the lives of twelve people who live or work in the same apartment complex in Tel Aviv.

Laila In Haifa is set over one fateful night in a club in the port town of Haifa and explores the interweaving stories of five women. The film aims to present a snapshot of contemporary life in one of the last remaining spaces where Israelis and Palestinians come together to engage in face-to-face relationships.

Ahasverus, king of Persia and Media, puts aside Vashti and makes Esther his queen, choosing her among maidens in a kingdom stretching from India to Ethiopia. Esther, using information from Mordecai, her uncle and patron, saves the king from assassination. Haman, the king's favorite, is miffed when Mordecai won't bow to him, so he orders death to all Jews in the kingdom, under the seal of the king. Esther pleads for her people, and Mordecai is in turn given license to make his own edict under the king's seal. Mordecai loses sight of his original intention, and bloody murder ensues. Purim annually celebrates the story. At the end of the film, the actors comment.

A man endeavors to collect memories of his grandparents who died in a concentration camp during the Holocaust.

In Haifa, Moshe, a 40-year-old hypochondriac in a troubled marriage, leads a chaotic life between his affair, his complicated friendship with Jules, and his struggles with his identity. His mother tries to help him find stability.

Amos Gitai returns to the West Bank to better understand the efforts of the citizens, both Israelis and Palestinians, to try to overcome the consequences of the 50-year occupation. Interspersing footage of his interviews with Yitzhak Rabin from the 1990s with the contemporary interviews of everyday citizens.

From Israel's most important filmaker, CARMEL is Amos Gitai's (KADOSH, KIPPUR) deeply personal and resonant meditation on Jewish and Israeli identity. Using both fiction and documentary techniques, Gitai links his family history to ancient history.

On a tramway that connects several of Jerusalem's neighborhoods from East to West, a mosaic of people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds are brought together.

Danny Cornish, a sort of stateless man who arranges art exhibits, is called from Tel Aviv to Paris with the news that a great uncle has died, in Birobidjan, the autonomous Jewish zone in Russia, leaving him a valuable art collection and the hand of a huge sculpture of a Golem. The uncle's will instructs Danny to find the rest of the statue, so Danny, who speaks no Russian, embarks on a trip that takes him (and the Golem's hand) to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Siberia, fumbling with hotel clerks, taxi drivers, and bureaucrats, following leads, and making discoveries about myth, story telling, art, and hope.

Two interconnected stories in the 1930s, one set in Berlin, the other in Palestine: Mania Vilbouchevich Shohat (1880-1961), called Tania, a Russian Jew and revolutionary, goes from Minsk to Palestine to live on a collective. She promotes feminism and laments a shift in the men from self-defense to aggression. Her friend, Else Lasker-Schuler (1869-1945), expressionist poet and German Jew, is in Berlin, writing, caring for her son, watching Hitler's movement take power. She goes to Jerusalem and imagines a park for Arab and Jew. Her poems, voiced from within, capture her experience. The film meditates on the violence at the root of Israel's birth: of the Nazis and of the Zionists.

The West Jerusalem building is no longer the microcosm it once was. Its inhabitants dispersed, this common space has disintegrated, but remains both an emotional and physical center at heart of the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

One day in April, Caesar and Israel learn of the death of their friend Goldman's father. They intend to go to the funeral but since they do not know the burial place, they miss the burial.

A story about the life of Sagi Dash, a legendery guitar player.

Traveling through Japan, synth-pop legends Eurythmics test out new ideas about music in a rarely-seen early film by the celebrated Israeli director.

This documentary by Amos Gitai is a personal look at the aftermath of the Rabin assassination.

A woman and her sisters face exile after their husbands' deaths, mirroring the Jewish Golem legend. Set in 1990s Paris, it explores migration and displacement themes through their experiences.

With the feel of experimental film, Gitai mixes storytelling, readers' theater, cityscapes (usually seen from moving trains), and desolate landscapes to mediate on the act of creation. What if a golem were fashioned out of dirt, much like Adam, and came to life? The film imagines it, in the desert and in Moscow. Interspersed are stories of a 14th-century Tuscan artist's creation of a tower that plays music when the wind blows, of a film director, and of Jeremiah and Sirat. In what ways is making a movie like creating a golem?

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 interviews Palestinian laborers at work on renovations and excavating an old tunnel to the Holy Mount. What do people think of each other, what do they think of Israel, what do they think of co-existence? Do the current residents know the house's history?

Twenty years after his first Wadi, Amos Gitai returns for the third time to Wadi Rushmia.