Shmulik Kraus

In a little Jerusalem apartment, surrounded by dolls and cats, Miriam Yalan-Shtekelis wrote children’s songs that have captured hearts for many generations of Israelis: The Doll Named Zehava, The Soap that Cried a Lot, Michael, and many more. The director, photographer, editor, designer and writer Reuven Brodeski created the atmosphere of a Russian legend about Yalan-Shtekelis, using miniatures that he fashioned himself for the film, interviewing people who knew her, and telling the story of Israel’s most important figure in children’s literature.

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Shmulik Kraus is considered the founding father of modern Israeli music, a controversial figure. Five decades of creative work intertwined with madness, jail time and violence, this film portrays a complex character. The manic depressive illness he suffered from trapped Kraus in a vicious cycle; each album recording ended in his hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital. Yet, his passion to create new music did not cease there. Kraus passed away unexpectedly in 2013 during the shooting of this film. He was 77. Combining archive footage with intimate interviews and scenes documented during a two year time span, the film unravels a different Kraus: human, tender, a weary warrior. We are offered a deeper look into a troubled, once-adored artist, from the perspective of his life's end.

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An American ambassador to Israel tries to bring peace to the Middle East conflict through unconventional methods, but his efforts are hampered at every turn and his personal life threatened.

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Yoni, an Israeli pop singer, and Walid, a Palestinian Arab professor, raise money from a German source in order to build a Palestinian college within Israel. But both are trapped in a deadly struggle: Palestinian radicals attempt to use Yoni and Walid to purchase arms, while the Israeli secret police try use them to locate Arab extremists.

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A film adaptation of Yoram Kaniuk’s book. An Israeli artist leaves his wife and daughter in New York and returns to Israel after years of absence. He seeks to decipher the meaning of his sense of failure as a person, as a family man, as an artist. His best friends died in the war, his paintings were burned, he abandoned his family. He decides to make a film about himself, his parents, Tel Aviv, about everything that is contained in the puzzle called human life – but in the end he burns his work.

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A handsome and successful surgeon, Dr. Dan Adam, sets out to refute a psychologist's thesis that "a man who recognizes his own self-worth will not kill or murder to solve his problems." Dr. Adam begins terrorizing the life of the psychologist and persecutes his wife and daughter.

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The Spanish explorer Pizarro captures the Inca god-chief Atahualpa and promises to free him upon the delivery of a hoard of gold. But Pizarro finds himself torn between his desire for conquest and his sense of honor after friendship and respect develops between captive and captor.

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A man pretends to be married to his ex-wife for the sake of his mother’s sanity. But when he finds love with his secretary, and later a 17-year-old, he ends up lost in confusion.

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Aliza mizrahi, the building cleaner, solves a murder where the police fails

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A film about the clash between the patriarchal values of Jewish immigrants from North Africa and modern life.

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A comic and episodic satire, the film uses improvisation to illustrate the clash between fantasy and reality in real life. Although conceived in the style of Mekas’ “Hallelujah the hills” (1962), it’s an authentically Israeli satire, an openly rebellious and individualistic expression that poked fun at the sacred myths of earlier zionist films. The technique of film within the film is used to portray cinema as reflection of the imagination, a miracle based on dreams and fantasies that take on concrete characteristics – parallel to the miracle of Israel, the dream that has become reality. Although not a commercial success, its importance is beyond any measure, though it remains a unique experiment, boldly uncommercial and subversive, out of any context in that patriotic, ideological epoch.

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