Israel Prize-winning filmmaker Ram Loevy, known for his outstanding television dramas and movies and for being one of the founders of the Israeli television industry, passed away at the age of 85, his family announced on Sunday.
Loevy, who suffered from Parkinson’s Disease for many years, made his first feature film, The Dead of Jaffa, in 2020, about a childless Arab couple in Jaffa who take in children from the West Bank just as a British movie crew arrived to make a film set in the neighborhood. The movie examined issues of coexistence and injustice, and he spoke of his hopes for the creation of a joint Jewish-Arab film industry in Jaffa when it was released.
Among his television films were Hirbet Hiza (1978), an adaptation of a novel by S. Yizhar; Indian in the Sun (1981), about a soldier tasked with escorting a mysterious recruit to a military prison; and Bread (1986), which starred singer Etti Ankri in a gritty drama about the hardship a family in a development town faces when an industrial bakery closes. Loevy, who often collaborated with Gilad Evron, adapted two novels by A. B. Yehoshua into television series, Mr. Mani (1996) and A Late Divorce (2016).
He also made many major documentaries, including Barricades (1969), Nebuchadnezzar in Caesarea (1980), and My Name is Ahmad, a 1966 documentary about an Arab laborer that was the first time an Arab had been front and center in an Israeli film.
'It was my dream that Israeli films would be seen all over the world'
His father, Theodor Loevy, was a journalist at Danziger Echo, a Jewish newspaper in Danzig. He was expelled just ahead of World War II and came to Palestine, where Loevy was born shortly afterward. Loevy was married to Zipora, his childhood sweetheart, and was a proud father and grandfather.
He studied economics and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, but he was drawn to filmmaking after seeing Fellini’s classic, 8½. He was studying at a film school in London when the Six-Day War broke out, and he returned to Israel as fast as he could. After the war, he helped set up the Israel Broadcasting Authority and Channel One in the late sixties. He also taught at several film schools.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post ahead of the release of The Dead of Jaffa, he spoke about the blossoming of Israel’s entertainment industry in the 21st century, saying, “It was my dream that Israeli films would be seen all over the world, that they would be so good,” and he saw his dream realized.