Arava Film Festival: World cinema in the Negev

The Arava International Film Festival, an open-air film event, will take place from November 14-23 in a beautiful part of the Negev, next to Tsukim in the Ashush Natural Reserve midway between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea. 

Every night, several feature films will be shown on a large screen with state-of-the-art projection equipment. The films shown represent the best of contemporary cinema from around the world, as well as classics and Israeli films. Watching movies in this setting is a magical experience, and many viewers return year after year.

In spite of the war, the organizers said in a statement that they decided to hold this year’s festival as planned, “Out of a desire to create an inclusive and embracing space, and in the hope that the hostages and soldiers will return home safely.”

Order of events

The festival will open with I’m Still Here, the latest film by Brazilian director Walter Salles, who is best known for Academy Award-nominated road movies Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries (an adaptation of Che Guevara’s memoir). I’m Still Here, which won awards for directing and screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, tells the story of a mother (Fernanda Torres) who lives in the military dictatorship ruled Brazil in the 1970s and is forced to reinvent herself when her family’s life is shattered by an act of violence. In addition to Torres, it stars Fernanda Montenegro, the great actress who received an Oscar nomination for her work in Central Station. 

Among the highlights of the international program will be Anora by Sean Baker, a rom-com about a prostitute who marries a Russian oligarch’s son that was the surprise winner at Cannes this year, and Pedro Almodovar’s latest film, The Room Next Door, which stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as former magazine colleagues who encounter each other again after many years. The Room Next Door won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival. These films will be released in Israel by the Lev Cinemas chain. 

Michel Hazanavicius’s latest film, the animated Holocaust drama The Most Precious of Cargoes, will be shown as well. Hazanavicius made the multi-Oscar-winning silent film, The Artist. 

Several digitally restored classics will be screened at the festival. These will include Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman, and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas with Nastassja Kinski and Harry Dean Stanton, both films that, like Anora, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. 

John Cassavetes’s Gloria, a crime drama starring the director’s wife, the great actress Gena Rowlands, who died recently, will be screened. 

Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, and it will be shown at the festival. 

Milos Forman’s 1979 adaptation of the 1960s musical sensation Hair will be shown. It stars Treat Williams in the story of a young man on his way to enlist for the military during the Vietnam War who falls in with a group of hippies. 

For more information and to order tickets, go to the festival website at www.aravaff.co.il