Arava and Docaviv Galilee film festivals announce wartime programs

The Arava International Film Festival, which was postponed due to the war, announced Tuesday that it will be held from November 30 to December 8. It is offering free tickets to the 2,000 evacuees from the South, who were welcomed to the area by the Central Arava Regional Council, which also produces the festival.

In addition to free tickets to the film festival, the council is providing a special school for evacuee children that will be established in the Arava High School and is set to open its doors this week. There is also a network offering emotional support and social activities. The council emphasized that it is offering any and all support it can to promote the well-being of those from the communities that were devastated by the attack. 

The central Arava region has been designated a “green” area, where life can go on as normal, however, all Homefront Command safety precautions will be followed during the film festival. 

The festival will feature more than 25 films from all over the world, including Israel, and they will be screened in the outdoor screening complex in the village of Zuqim. Watching movies outdoors under the desert sky is a beautiful, memorable experience, unlike any other that I have been lucky enough to enjoy, and I recommend it. 

The films that will be shown have won top prizes at international festivals, such as Cannes and Berlin. Among them will be Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki’s acclaimed new film, Fallen Leaves, about two lonely people who find each other one night in Helsinki; Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a strange look at the life of the family of the commander of Auschwitz; Michel Franco’s Memory, about a social worker (Jessica Chastain) and a man (Peter Sarsgaard) she meets at her high school reunion; Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, a look at the struggles of a teacher in rural Turkey; Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, about a Tokyo intellectual who chooses to live his life as a cleaner; and the latest film by the master animation director Hayao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron, which I think will play especially well at a desert screening. 

Docaviv festival to go online in light of security situation

Among the Israeli films will be David Volach’s Daniel Auerbach, a movie about a director who can’t make a movie, which won the Haggiag Award for Best Israeli Feature Film at the Jerusalem Film Festival this year. 

The Arava International Film Festival will feature locally made films and classics, including a screening of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. A digitally restored copy of Jonathan Demme’s iconic Stop Making Sense, which presents a performance by the Talking Heads, will also be shown. 

While evacuees may attend the festival for free, discount tickets for the general public are available at aravaff.co.il/en/

Due to the security situation in the north, the Docaviv Galilee Film Festival in Ma’alot Tarshiha cannot hold physical screenings, but there will be an online edition of the festival from November 22-25, free of charge, with an option to make a donation that will go to filmmakers. 

The festival will feature films from Israel and around the world. Among the premieres will be Alison Ellwood’s Let the Canary Sing, a tribute to singer Cyndi Lauper; Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’s The Mission, about an American missionary who was killed when he tried to make contact with an isolated community in India; and Call Me a Dancer by Pip Gilmour and Leslie Shampaine, the award-winning story of a street dancer in India who fights the odds to become a professional. 

The festival will also feature a tribute to the student filmmakers at Sapir College in Sderot, in collaboration with the Cinema of the South Festival, as well as in-person screenings in the center of the country, of children’s films for children who have been evacuated from the South. 

For more details, go to docaviv.co.il/