The 41st Haifa International Film Festival, which will take place from October 5-14 at the Haifa Cinematheque and other theaters around the city, features both serious dramas and more light-hearted films, striking a perfect balance for those looking for escapism but also hoping to enjoy cinema that helps illuminate our troubled times. Yaron Shamir is the artistic director of the festival.
There is no way to look at the schedule of this year’s festival and not think back two years, since October 7, 2023, was the last day of that year’s film festival and had to be canceled, and the second anniversary falls during this year’s festival. The festival will take a pause late in the evening of October 7, and the official ceremony marking the massacre will be broadcast in the Rapaport Auditorium, for free.
Films on October 7
One of the first feature films to deal with the events of October 7, Dani Rosenberg’s Of Dogs and Men, will be shown in this year’s Israeli competition. This movie is about a 16-year-old girl (Ori Avinoam, who just won an Ophir Award for Best Supporting Actress for the movie Cuz You’re Ugly), who returns to Kibbutz Nir Oz shortly after October 7 to search for her dog that went missing during the massacre.
It was filmed in the fall of 2023 and captures the haunting atmosphere of the region that was devastated by the attack. Other than Avinoam, the other actors are people from the Gaza Envelope, and the movie was made on the fly in late 2023, when the area was completely desolate, save for a military presence. It’s a haunting film that beautifully captures the emotions of that moment.
Several other movies are being shown by well-known Israeli directors that sound intriguing. Eran Kolirin, whose movie The Band’s Visit became an international sensation, has a new film called Some Notes on the Current Situation, the description of which makes it sound surreal.
Isri Halpern’s Proud Jewish Boy is an animated documentary about Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish-Jewish teenager who assassinated a German diplomat in Paris in 1938, which the Nazis used as an excuse for the Kristallnacht pogrom.
Actor/director Shady Srour made an irreverent comedy, Holy Air, in 2017, but he has a new, more serious film in this year’s festival, called Fadia, and it tackles the issue of honor killings in the Arab community. It stars Srour, along with Ala Dakka, Yara Jarrar, and Shadi Mar’i.
Srour is also one of the co-directors of a new documentary television series that will be screened at the festival, Split, which he made with Dina Zvi Riklis. It’s about Arabs and Jews living together in several of Israel’s mixed cities – Acre, Ramle, Haifa, Jaffa, and Lod, from 1948 until today.
Eran Zarahovitsh, one of the writers on the comedy show Eretz Nehederet, is the star and one of the creators of the new series Canteen Commando, which will have its premiere at the festival. It’s an irreverent look at a recruit (Amir Tessler) who ends up serving elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit soldiers at a canteen, working for his estranged father, played by Zarahovitsh. Real-life special forces soldier and actor Yadin Gellman, who was wounded in the fighting at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, appears in it, along with Michael Aloni, who is best known for Shtisel.
The Gala section of the festival includes Mariana’s Room, directed by Emmanuel Finkiel, an adaptation of Aharon Appelfeld’s acclaimed novel, Blooms of Darkness, about a prostitute (Melanie Thierry) who hides an 11-year-old Jewish boy in her room in a brothel to save him from the Holocaust.
László Nemes’s Orphan, the opening-night movie, which will be shown several more times, tells the story of a young Jewish boy in 1950s Hungary who is surprised when a brutish man shows up claiming to be his father.
The Haifa Docs section has a rich selection of Jewish-interest films this year, including Christoph Weinert’s Jewish Voices: Resurrected Songs, about two small labels that defied boycotts to record Yiddish folk music and klezmer in Nazi Germany and features contemporary performances of this music; Katherina Otto-Bernstein’s The Last Spy, which will be screened in the presence of the director, traces the life of CIA master operative Peter Sichel, who was a German-Jewish refugee to the US; Claude Lanzmann’s A Visitor from the Living, drawn from an interview in which he confronted Red Cross official Maurice Rossel over his report on Theresienstadt, which he called “satisfactory”; and Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness, which mines Lanzmann’s archives to create an unforgettable and intimate portrait of the director as he made Shoah.
Among the many international dramas that will be screened for the first time in Israel are Petra Volpe’s Late Shift, a suspenseful medical drama about a nurse (Leonie Benesch of The Teacher’s Lounge and September 5), in an understaffed hospital, who races against time to correct a mistake that could cost a patient his life.
Jodie Foster stars in her first French-speaking lead role in A Private Life by Rebecca Zlotowski, playing a psychiatrist who is convinced a patient’s death involves foul play and investigates.
Dag Johan Haugerud’s Dreams, the final installment in his Sex, Love, Dreams trilogy, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, will be shown alongside Sex and Love.
Blue Moon stars Ethan Hawke in a biopic about the great Jewish-American composer Lorenz Hart, and was directed by Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Before Sunrise).
There will be several new American indie films at the festival. In Matthew Shear’s debut feature, Fantasy Life, he also stars as an unemployed man who starts babysitting for his psychiatrist’s granddaughters and falls for their mother (Amanda Peet), in a movie that costars Judd Hirsch, Zosia Mamet, and Alessandro Nivola. Fantasy Life will be shown on a double bill with Late Fame by Kent Jones, which stars Willem Dafoe as a forgotten poet who is embraced by a coterie of 20-somethings.
The Haifa Classics section, excellent as always, features the 1970 caper film Red Sun by Terence Young, starring Toshiro Mifune, Alain Delon, Ursula Andress, and Charles Bronson.
Erran Baron Cohen, a distinguished composer for films, one of the festival’s guests, will give a master class in which he discusses his work. He has composed music for several films by his brother, Sacha Baron Cohen, including Borat and The Dictator, as well as many other movies. Additional guests at this event will be Edan Alterman, a musician and comedian, and Alon Gur Aryeh, a director and composer.
Last but definitely not least, Rob Reiner’s cult classic This Is Spinal Tap returns for a celebratory double feature alongside the brand-new sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, reuniting England’s loudest band for one last concert – let’s hope the amps at Haifa go up to 11.
For more information, go to the festival website at www.haifaff.co.il/eng