The Sam Spiegel International Film Lab project pitching event will take place as part of the Venice Production Bridge, the film market at Venice, and one of the major networking events for the global film industry at the 82nd Venice Film Festival.
The festival, the oldest and one of the largest in the world, will open on Wednesday and run until September 6.
This is the first time since its establishment 13 years ago that Sam Spiegel's International Film Lab will hold its annual pitching event as part of the Venice Film Festival. The event awards production prizes totaling $70,000.
Among the 10 projects participating this year – from Austria, Brazil, France, Hungary, Slovakia, and Israel – is Family Honor, co-directed and written by Hisham Suliman and Sari Bisharat. It will be the feature directorial debut for Suliman, an actor known for Fauda, Bethlehem, and Munich, as well as for Bisharat, who made the short film Tormus.
The logline for the film reads: “When a young girl is murdered in her home village, an Arab detective in the Israeli police is assigned to the case – a suspected honor killing that compels him to confront his own values, his family, and the complex social fabric of the community he comes from.”
Another project is Gilad Inbar’s Gut Feeling, co-written by Benny Fredman, about a female Shin Bet operative who finds herself facing an unwanted pregnancy.
One of the best film schools in the world
The Lab, created by the Sam Spiegel School of Film and Television, ranked among the 15 best film schools in the world, serves as a platform for the development of groundbreaking feature films by promising filmmakers from Israel and around the world. Its alumni have made films that won international awards, including Son of Saul (which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2016); Murina (winner of the Golden Camera Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021); Girls Will Be Girls (winner of the awards for Audience Favorite and Best Actress at Sundance in 2024); and many more.
This year, films by the Lab's graduates lead the nominations for the Ophir Film Awards, with 13 nominations for The Sea, 12 for Dead Language, and eight for Oxygen. In 2024, the debut film by another graduate, Tom Nesher’s Come Closer, won four Ophir Awards, including Best Film.
Dana Blankstein Cohen, CEO of Sam Spiegel, said, "Holding the pitching event at the Venice Film Festival emphasizes the importance of a free and international creative environment that enables dialogue and promotes values of human love and compassion. We call for an immediate end to the war and are committed to continuing to empower student creators, Israelis and Palestinians, to maintain freedom of expression and to foster intercultural collaborations."
Mor Eldar, director of the Sam Spiegel Labs, commented, "Ten projects from around the world, by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish creators, who together went through eight months of intensive development, are coming to an end at one of the most important film festivals in the world. While working on their first or second films, they have proven once again the power of cinema to connect people – both behind the scenes and in front of the camera."
The Lab’s participation at Venice is welcome news in a year when only one film from Israel was accepted in the festival, a virtual-reality short called Eddie and I by Maya Shekel.