2023 EventS grid

A smash hit in Israel and winner of the Best Narrative Feature Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, Zero Motivation is a unique, sharply observed, sometimes dark and often hilarious portrait of everyday life for a unit of young, female soldiers in a remote Israeli desert outpost. Playing out like M*A*S*H meets Orange is the New Black, Talya Lavie's brilliant debut details the power struggles of three women with different agendas and very little to do. Pencil-pushers in the Human Resources Office, best friends Zohar (Dana Ivgy) and Daffi (Nelly Tagar) spend their time playing video games, singing pop songs, jousting with stationery and dreaming of Tel Aviv. The indolent twosome are watched over by their aspiring senior officer, Rama (Shani Klein), who dreams of a higher position and a significant military career, but with a platoon of unskilled, idle, female soldiers without any drive under her charge, her ambitions for promotion are constantly thwarted.

A group of families emigrate from India to Israel in the late sixties, seeking a better life in what they believe to be the first outpost of the West in Asia. To their surprise, they are sent to a new settlement in the middle of the desert, populated mostly by Moroccan Jews. The two cultures clash as the group tries to integrate into the community, and are faced by harsh realities. But despite the conflicts and prejudices, a strong friendship develops between two girls from opposite sides of the struggle. The film finds a perfect combination between humor and sentiment in a very real and very difficult situation.

Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi in his breakthrough role) is a 31-year old Israeli bachelor, handsome and intelligent, and his family wants to see him married. But tradition dictates that Zaza has to choose a young virgin. She must be beautiful and from a good family, preferably rich. Zaza's parents, Yasha and Lily, drag Zaza to meet potential brides and their families. Zaza has no choice. He plays along with his family, advocates of the suffocating traditions of their Georgian Jewish heritage. But Zaza always manages to somehow get out of being engaged. What his parents don't know is that Zaza is already in love. Judith is sensuous, strong and intriguing. She's also a divorcee with a 6-year-old daughter. So Zaza has kept Judith a secret from his family. He will have to choose between respect for the strict confines of family and tradition, or the love of his life. Israel's submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 74th Academy Awards.

A madman escapes from the asylum in Tel-Aviv, and starts digging a canal right in the middle of one of the main streets. Due to the bureaucratic mess in the city administration, not only does nobody try to stop him, he actually receives the help of the police, the city engineer, etc. The one city clerk who finds out what is really going on is, of course, declared insane...

The film is a romantic comedy which takes place in Israel during the Austerity period of the 1950s. The main hero is Alex, a 13 year old boy who is about to attend his Bar Mitzvah. Alex has a typical Polish mother and father that suffer quietly. On account of the difficult economic situation they are compelled to share their apartment with a Persian tenant named Faruk that tries to fight his baldness by means of different creams. Alex falls in love with the new girl in his class, Mimi. Everything changes when his aunt Lola arrives in Israel from Poland to search for a lost love. They were together when she lived in Poland but he vanished when Nazis conquered the country. Alex falls for his aunt and she on her part gives him more than just maternal love. The film describes in the exact form the atmosphere that dominated the country in the 1950s, known as the Austerity in Israel including, the black market, the radio broadcasts concentrating on the search for lost relatives, music of the 1950s, the clothes and dresses and pastimes.

Jacob Fidelman, proprietor of an antique restoration business in Tel Aviv, is lost. His partner of forty years has just died, his business is at death’s door, and his hot shot son Noah is trying to force him to sell the shop. But then Fidelman takes on a new employee, Anton, who discovers the potential value locked in a decrepid 1882 Steinway piano, and who also starts to fall for Noah’s wife, eight months pregnant with Fidelman’s grandson. Nominated for 11 Israeli Academy Awards.