40th Haifa film festival features global hits and Israeli cinema highlights

The 40th Haifa International Film Festival, which will run from December 31 to January 11, will feature the year’s most acclaimed films, from abroad and Israel, and many new titles have been added to the lineup recently.

While the festival is traditionally held during the Sukkot holiday, this year it was delayed due to the war, and will now coincide with the winter holiday season and will include a special day of festive opening events.

It will open with the lighting of Hanukkah candles, which will be followed by several special screenings, including a sing-along version of the popular musical Wicked; Better Man, a docudrama about Robbie Williams; and, late in the evening, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, where the audience is encouraged to come in costume, to be followed by an alternative rock music party.

The opening night will also feature a screening of the first episode of Saturday Night Live, which introduced the world to Chevy Chase and John Belushi; and the new docudrama Saturday Night, about the early days of the series, will also be shown at the festival.

There are many more opening events, so check the festival website for the details: www.haifaff.co.il/. Tickets will go on sale on December 18, for the opening and all the movies.

As someone who has attended this festival regularly for many years, I can say that it has always had a very festive atmosphere, both at the screenings and in the festival plaza and garden, and this year sounds as if it will be especially fun.

What to look forward to watching

As always, there will be high-profile guests, and this year’s guest of honor is Michel Hazanavicius, the Oscar-winning director of The Artist, whose latest film, the animated The Most Precious of Cargoes, will be shown. The movie, which was in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival, is set during the Holocaust and tells the story of a rural couple who adopt a Jewish foundling.

The official opening film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, by Iranian dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof, will be shown on January 2. It’s a psychological thriller about how a Tehran judge begins to suspect his wife and daughters are involved in the protest movement.

The closing night film will be Nir Bergman’s Pink Lady, which won the Best Director award at the Tallinn Black Nights Festival last month.

Among the many highly anticipated films is Jesse Eisenberg’s latest movie, A Real Pain, which he wrote, directed, and stars in, and which tells the story of two cousins visiting Warsaw to honor the memory of their late grandmother, who was born there.

September 5, a drama by Tim Fehlbaum, tells the fact-based story of how an American sports broadcasting team ended up covering the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Other high-profile, recent films include The Brutalist, by Brady Corbet, which stars Adrien Brody as a pioneering Hungarian architect; Israeli director Savi Gabizon’s English remake of his film Longing, which stars Richard Gere as a man who learns late in life that he had a son; Edward Berger’s The Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci, about the selection of a new pope; and Eran Riklis’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, about a group of women who gather in that city to read literature forbidden by the regime.

There will also be Israeli and international competitions, culinary cinema, classics, and animated films for the whole family.