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Further new projects include In The Land Of Limpopo by Gur Bentwich and post-war drama Wild Animals by Yona Rozenkier.

The next film from award-winning Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid will be Yes! – one of five features in to receive fresh investment from the Israel Film Fund.

The director of Berlin Golden Bear winner Synonyms and Cannes jury prize winner Ahed’s Knee is in pre-production on the feature, and has received NIS2.2m from the Israel Film Fund.

Locally titled Ken!, Lapid’s fifth feature revolves around a character named Y. He decides that what takes real courage is not saying “no,...

Projects from France-Iran and India were the big winners at this year’s Berlinale Co-Production Market, which is part of the European Film Market.

The Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, endowed with €20,000, went to the producers of Caractères Productions from France, and Honare Khiyal from Iran for their project “My Favourite Cake” by directors Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam.

The Vff Talent Highlight Award with prize money of €10,000 went to director Shuchi Talati’s “Girls Will Be Girls.” The film is to be produced by Pushing Buttons Studios, an outfit founded by Indian actors Ali Fazal (“Death on the Nile”) and Richa Chadha (“Gangs of Wasseypur”) and co-produced by Sanjay Gulati and Pooja Chauhan of Crawling Angel Films (2020 Berlinale selection “The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs”) and Claire Chassagne of Dolce Vita Films (2019 Venice and Cairo winner “A Son”).

The award is presented annually by the Vff — Copyright Agency of...

The shortened in-person Berlin Film Festival (Feb. 10-16) has revealed a raft of high profile shows that will participate in keenly anticipated annual fixture Berlinale Series.

The strand opens with Amazon Prime Video Argentinian spy series “Yosi, the Regretful Spy” and also includes HBO Max Swedish friendship comedy series “Lust”; Lone Scherfig’s TV2 Danish maternity ward-set “The Shift”; Czech Television, Arte drama “Suspicion” from Czech Republic and France; British Sky supernatural thriller “The Rising”; Channel 2 Iceland police drama “Black Sand”; and from France’s Club illico, comedy-drama “Last Summers of the Raspberries.”

Films selected for the youth-focused Generation Kplus strand include “The Hill of Secrets” (South Korea); “Waters of Pastaza” (Portugal); “Moja Vesna” (Slovenia/Australia); “My Small Land” (Japan); “The Realm of God” (Mexico); “The Apple Day” (Iran); “Shabu” (Netherlands) and “Boney Piles” (Ukraine).

Films selected for the Generation 14plus strand include “Alis” (Colombia/Chile/Romania); “Bubble” (Japan...

Company lines up Eran Kolirin [pictured], Yuval Adler and Itamar Alcalay.

The budding feature film arm of leading Israeli media and entertainment company Dori Media Paran (Dmp) unveils rough cut material from Amikam Kovner and Assaf Snir’s infidelity drama Echoes at the Jerusalem Pitch Point works-in-progress showcase today (July 17), part of this year’s Jerusalem Film Festival.

It is one of the first auteur productions to come out of the Israeli media company’s move into feature film production, which began some four years ago.

Co-starring Yoram Toledano and Yael Abecassis, it revolves around a husband who uncovers another side to his wife and family when he listens in on her conversations with her lover. When she dies in an accident, he becomes obsessed with uncovering the identity of the other man.

Keren Michael, who heads up Dmp’s feature film division, will present the project alongside Dmp CEO Yoni Paran.

Having previously...

This article was produced as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring journalists at the Locarno Film Festival, a collaboration between the Locarno Film Festival, IndieWire and the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the support of Film Comment and the Swiss Alliance of Film Journalists. The following interview, conducted by a member of the Critics Academy, focuses on a participant in the affiliated Filmmakers Academy program at the festival.

“Because it’s Israel, everything you make is automatically political,” said the 29-year-old writer-director Assaf Machnes. “Even a cat drinking milk is a political film in Israel.”

Read More: Here’s What One Young Filmmaker Learned From Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang

Capturing how it feels to come of age as an Israeli today, Machnes’ subversive cinema uses deeply personal experiences— military service and touring the WW2 death camps at the age of 17 — as material for crafting absurd humor,...