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Open House | Israel today

2020-11-01T10:21:01.998Z


The Corona crisis has turned the house into a place of refuge and at the same time a prison • Ma'aleh Film School has invited artists from all over the world to tell about the house | Israel This Week - Political Supplement


The Corona crisis has turned our home into a place of refuge and at the same time a prison, some have lost their homes and some have given up • The Ma'aleh Film School has invited creators from all over the world to send a 2-minute video about the complex word "home"

  • Photography: 

    Photos: Niwar Kestayi, Osama Anwar, Photo processing: Scout Tzachi from the film - Photo: Eli Singer, Sivan Felder

What place do you call "home"?

It is common to think that even if we move through countless apartments in our lives - even if the family splits and is torn between "Dad's apartment" and "Mom's apartment" - even if you are a nomadic turtle that has no walls at all, only a backpack - there is one place you will always call "home" , And only one place.

One and only place in Hebrew where you can add the God of the trend.

Home.

Home, "a word with movement in it," to the only place where you really rest.

Walking or running to the place where you can undress, physically and psychologically, and feel protected. 

The human title of 2020, between and within the closures, is probably this one house.

Egypt, its borders, what takes place inside it, the view from it out.

They closed the door on us.

The plague stops abruptly.

This week we closed a competition initiated by the Ma'aleh Film School and invited creators from all over the world to submit 2-minute films, in all genres, on the subject of "Home" (in English: HOMEWARD).

Within a month, more than 500 films arrived.

500 fascinating views of a house. 

"Home is a wish to get to a place where almost everything that happens is relevant to me," was the voice of writer David Grossman in the theme video of the competition.

"The house is a place I am made of, quite a bit, from its materials, even from the ones I don't like," Grossman defines.

"A place where I know how to decipher its codes. It's clear to me where its boundaries are, and where the place that is no longer my home begins."

•••

The page showing the videos submitted to the competition looks like an art exhibition and an open book.

It turns out that while the citizens of the world are hidden in Noah's boxes - the imagination has not been cut off, and he passes the thresholds.

While existence comes down to the square meters on which we pay property taxes - creativity is still burning, there is constant fire, and there is no surgical mask to turn it off.

120 seconds each video.

Animation, documentary, plot, video art, dance, amateur photography on a smartphone or professional photography with two cameras of professionals in the field of acting and cinema. 

Familiar names star among the creators.

In addition to Grossman, you can watch films sent by Minister of Culture Hili Trooper, Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon, journalist Menachem Horowitz, singer Yehoram Gaon, singer Yasmin Levy, author Galit Distel Atbrian, actress Meski Shibro.

A journey to the house, within it, from it.

The products can be seen on the YouTube page "Home Competition" or under the tag #HaBayitah on YouTube.

Photos: Niwar Kestayi, Osama Anwar, Photo processing: Scout Tzachi from the film - Photo: Eli Singer, Sivan Felder

"I did not think it would catch on so strongly," says Neta Ariel, the thinker of the idea, the principal of the Jerusalem Ma'aleh Film School.

"We were moved by the response. At the height of the second closure, which was emotionally difficult, we experienced a longing and thirst to create. Videos of ultra-Orthodox, Russian immigrants who created in their native language, of Israeli Arabs. Quite a few dealt with sensitive issues around the home such as divorce, depression, domestic violence. "Orphanhood, anxiety. Personal exposure is not self-evident." 

"Ma'aleh" was joined by partners, led by the World Zionist Organization and the Jerusalem Film and Television Project (as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jewish federations, the Jerusalem Municipality, Nefesh Benefesh, Taglit and more).

The three winning videos will be announced in a month and will win cash prizes of $ 1,000 to $ 3,000.

In addition, five more films will win "Audience Favorites" awards, $ 500 each.

You can vote for the Audience Favorite Award via Like on YouTube until the end of the month. 

The judging panel includes Israeli-Israeli actress Ayelet Zorer, creator Uri Alon ("Stisl"), American producers Zvi Howard-Rosenman and Nancy Spielberg (Steven Spielberg's sister), and artist Hadassah Goldwicht.

Everyone does the judging work voluntarily. 

About 70 percent of the films came from Israel, including minorities, and the rest flowed through tap pipes in the United States, Canada, Austria, Argentina, etc. The "home" is seen through the lenses as a physical, sometimes suffocating and sometimes embracing place - or as an emotional space that represents security. On the phone and writes dozens of times on the page "I still love you", knows that there is no ceiling and floor without it, because it is his home ("How in Argentina?" By Omar Barak). 

I enjoyed moving between the rhythmic, emotional and thought-provoking clips, most of which deserve the two minutes I devoted to them.

Comedian Jonathan Gruber presents "His Country," "The Homestead," through a geographical tour of the apartment: the pantry is "Food Avenue," two flower pots are "the reserve," a ball-throwing facility on the porch is "the arena," and the bookshelves are "the library, the source of knowledge." Of the house. "

For all of us, a rectangular apartment has become a fortress, a closed farm, as if it has everything.

But lacks freedom. 

Pleasant on the question of belonging

The house from which it is impossible to get out due to the plague gets a shadow of prison bars in some movies.

The movie "Closure" authentically reflects an anxiety attack.

"I have a fear of enclosed spaces," explained creator Esther Hale, "I had nightmares that the corona would last forever, that I would be stuck in the house, that I would not have air to breathe. I shot in closure. Because of the restrictions I could not help anyone so I directed, shot and edited on my own."

Photos: Niwar Kestayi, Osama Anwar, Photo processing: Scout Tzachi from the film - Photo: Eli Singer, Sivan Felder

I wander through the movies, peeking into the houses.

Accompanies Orr Reichert and his daughter on a journey to the house that cannot be reached, the house that is evacuated during the disengagement ("Father and Roni's journey home");

Dripping straight tears like lines in front of a mother who is depressed after giving birth, standing on the porch of the house, ignoring her baby's cries, in Miriam Adler's "Waiting";

Smiles in Nadav Naveh's film "Children are Joy", in which an inch-sized plastic threat disrupts the hero's consciousness;

Enjoys the ride on the timeline of the protagonist "Corona is just to keep your eyes open" (by Yanki and Mendi Elharar);

And stares at Yehudit Golan's film "HOMEMADE" for hope for an unfulfilled closeness. 

The house seems to be a huge canvas on which infinity can be drawn.

Bat El Musari ("What am I doing now?") Plays a woman who gets stuck at home with her biggest fear, a cockroach, and only in the tail of the film does her great pain become apparent.

Sivan Felder ("HOME") brings the voice of an ultra-Orthodox woman who returns home on the day of her divorce, and feels that it is no longer home.

Elderly people in their home loneliness fold their hearts ("Hug" by Eviatar Berkowitz; "The moving Ellie" by Ari Sommerfeld from the USA; "The Netivot House" by Hoshen and Tair Himmelfarb; and more). And there is also a happy home stay as in "Family Photo" Created by Uriah Kapf, and "Jackson House" by Raya Jackson.

Interestingly, the main emotion in the movies is longing.

Longing for place, for man, for stability.

It is reminiscent of the line in Jonathan Geffen's song "When You Say", "When You Say Bread, you feel at home."

What is the connection between bread and house?

Why do we all understand the homemade bread coupling?

These are not synonyms, nor a dictionary definition, and yet we all feel the semantic connection between bread and home.

The anchor.

The elementary element without which there is no life.

The smell.

the security.

The girls.

The creators of the diverse "home" are looking for that bread, of childhood, and moving within the question of belonging. 

"It's thought-provoking," says Hedva Goldschmidt, director of the Go2Films film distribution company and a lecturer in the competition.

"The response is impressive because the issue affects everyone. Under the masks there is fear. Young people who once were the world of their home and would fly all the time are asking today where the home is, space is suddenly reduced and it requires self-examination."

The house of the creator Hagai Adorian, for example, a wanderer by definition, is not made of blocks: the entire globe is his home.

"'Say, isn' t it hard when you do not have a house? ', Is a question I hear endlessly.' Walla, no ', I answer and ask back:' Isn't it hard when you have the same house all the time? '" Where are you from?".

"My home is where Wi-Fi is," he concludes.

"Six-word genre"

And suddenly, in an Israeli competition, a film from Iraq.

Two minutes in black and white.

Three children aged 4 to 10 ride a bike together.

They plan to return to the "house" with them.

The creator, Osama Muhammad Anwar, 25, is an Iraqi citizen of Muslim descent and belongs to the Kurdish people.

He was born and lives in Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq.

The conversation with Anwar is exciting;

A far-near world. 

Photos: Niwar Kestayi, Osama Anwar, Photo processing: Scout Tzachi from the film - Photo: Eli Singer, Sivan Felder

"I'm making independent film and for six years I'm also been an artistic consultant at the Dahuk Film Festival," he says in good English.

"I went to fade as part of a photography project with a director I work with. The children, members of the Smack family, approached the set and inquired. I asked if they would agree to be photographed themselves. They live in a dilapidated hut and said they had not seen their home for five years." 

why?



"They are a city called Sinjar. Six years ago, more than 10,000 Yazidi families in Sinjar were forced to flee their homes due to ISIS takeover of the area, including the children of this family. Presumably they were exposed to the atrocities that took place in Sinjar such as massacre and rape. "Return home because armed ISIS militias are waiting for them there."

The Sinjar massacre, of which Anwar speaks, was recognized by a UN commission as the Yazidi genocide. In August 2014, Islamic State militants seized Nineveh province, slaughtered and executed some 5,000 Yazidi minorities, and captured some 1,000 women and girls. In order to sell them for less, about a quarter of a million Kurdish refugees, including tens of thousands of Yazidis, fled for their lives in the direction of Turkey, towards the cities of Dahuk and Irbid. Executed or forced to convert to Islam, members of the Smack family managed to escape to a sparsely populated area on the outskirts of a suburb. 

And you meet these kids, sword refugees learning the horrors, and catching them in my childhood moment, riding a bike. 



"I filmed them documentarily assembling an improvised tricycle to return with it to their house, which is a three-hour drive away. They want to go home. The two eldest are 11. They were about 5 when they were evicted, but they remember the house. 

"When I saw the publicity about the competition, as part of a call issued by the World Film Schools Organization, I thought that's exactly what 'home' means. The Smack brothers are happy in their new home, despite its misery. Their lives go on because that's how it is in the world of young children. "The house is just one place for them - a place of longings they can not reach." 

You sent a film to an Israeli competition and you talk to me willingly, while our countries are hostile. 



"I do not feel strange about cooperating with Israelis. For me, Israel is a beautiful place and nothing beyond that. By the way, the likes I received for the film are not from Iraq but from Israel or the West. Iraqi citizens do not have YouTube accounts. I hope peace reaches the whole world. I "I see the world through the eyes of an artist. Art saved my life and opened my eyes." 

"Movies is our language," nods Neta Ariel, "the cinematic language crosses cultures. Competition is a social enterprise designed to allow everyone to express the meaning of home for them." 

Is it possible to express meaning in 120 seconds?



"Short film festivals around the world include 15- to 30-minute films but the world is getting thinner in its expression. Everything is short, fast, focused. And it requires sharper creative skill. Familiar with the phrase 'I did not have time to write short so I wrote long'. "The whipping of the written work is in a few words. Poetry, or the genre of a story in six words. The same goes for cinema. As the work gets shorter, you have to be smart. In 120 seconds you can fold a whole world."

Source: israelhayom

All news articles on 2020-11-01

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