Cinema South Festival returns to Sderot, honoring resilience after tragedy

Cinema South Festival is taking place in Sderot for the first time since October 7, when about 50 Sderot residents and 20 police officers were murdered by terrorists. 

The festival, which began on Sunday night and runs through November 14, is being held at the Sderot Cinematheque and other locations around the city. 

It was founded and is run by the School of Audio and Visual Arts at Sapir College.

The festival announced that, from now on, it will hold two events each year – the fall edition, focusing on the western Negev region, to be called Cinema South: In First-Person Perspective, and a second, in the spring, called the Cinema South International Film Festival.

This year’s fall edition puts the population of the western Negev front and center, spotlighting the hostages and their families, as well as those who suffered losses on October 7 and during the war. 

The festival will illuminate the impulses to commemorate the tragic losses and to try to find hope for the future. 

The opening film is Fragments of Paradise by director Ronit Ifergan, which documents the lives of the residents of Kibbutz Kfar Aza over the last 15 years. 

About 64 Kfar Aza residents were murdered on October 7, and 19 were kidnapped. 

Commemorating October 7 

The festival will close with the ceremony for the winners of the New Cinema South Competition, which features films by students at Sapir and includes a record 63 new films.

Many of the films this year will document the tragic events of October 7, including the documentaries The Battle of the Sderot Police Station by Eyal Belhassen, Rachel from Ofakim by Zohar Wagner, and Open Wound by Yousef Abo Madegem. 

Madegem’s debut feature, Eid, the story of a Rabat construction worker who longs to become a writer, which won the Jerusalem Film Festival’s top prize, will also be shown. 

A documentary project sponsored by the Cinema South Film Festival, “Exterior. Day. Saturday,” presents short films by Sapir graduates, and there will be movies from a film lab sponsored by Sapir College, as well as a magazine, South Notebooks, created by students. 

There will be a special program of films by high school students in memory of Ofir Libstein, the head of the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council, who was killed fighting terrorists in Kfar Aza. 

The head of the Sapir School of Audio and Visual Arts and the chairman of the festival, Sami Shalom Chetrit, said, “The November 2024 edition of the festival is a defining event for the School of Audio and Visual Arts at Sapir College, for our audience at the Cinema South Film Festival, for the residents of Sderot, for our audience from the [Gaza border region] kibbutzim and towns, for the cinematheque audience, and for our guests from Israel and the world. Nothing will ever be the same again. It will be our first festival, and that of the entire region, since the festival in 2022. It will be a homecoming celebration.

“This year I invite you to come and celebrate with us the victory of the spirit over evil, over fire and the knife. We haven’t stopped creating and recording even for a moment, because we don’t have such a privilege.”

The festival will also feature musical events and other gatherings in the center of town.

For more information, go to https://www.sapir.ac.il/cinema/csf