Dokaviv Festival 2022: The Recommendation Guide

The most exciting film of the year, the docu-reminiscent of how brave and important the opposition to Putin is, an extraordinary Holocaust docu-film and Sundance's hottest films.

The guide to the recommendations for the Dokaviv Festival

Avner Shavit

19/05/2022

Thursday, 19 May 2022, 00:03

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Trailer for "Nabalani" (CNN)

If we become optimistic and perhaps also complacent enough to declare that we are already living in the post-Corona era, then we can also say that the world of film festivals is back to normal.

Cannes now hosts the first "normal" festival after the plague, without masks and almost no restrictions or special conditions, and in Israel the festival season will soon begin - later this summer the Student Festival and the Jerusalem Festival will arrive, among others, and next week the Dokaviv Festival, one of the world's flagship events. Israeli cinema and local culture in general.

As part of its local competition, the festival will feature several premieres that are expected to emerge as the spoken-word Israeli documentaries of the year.

Their review can be found here.

In addition, it will also feature an incredibly rich and diverse world setting, featuring the best international docu-films of recent times.

Among other things, the festival will present in Israeli premieres the two big winners of the last Sundance Festival - "The Exiles" and "Everything Breathes".

The trouble is that awards, probably nowadays, are often arbitrary, even puzzling, and especially very political.

The fact that Dokaviv managed to get his hands on both is a notable achievement, but let me not recommend watching.

Instead, here are five other recommendations.

More on Walla!

This is the movie that Anne Frank deserves.

This is the movie the world needed

To the full article

From Sundance, back to Israel.

From "Tantura" (Photo: Yonatan Weizman / Reel Peak Movies)

Nothing Compares

Katherine Morrison's documentary about Shane O'Connor is for me the most exciting film I've seen in 2021, so of course it also stands at the top of my list of recommendations.

Nothing will match.

Musical docu is a common and generic commodity nowadays, but like O'Connor herself, this film turns out to be something special, which enlightens the eyes and extinguishes the soul.

In Ireland where O'Connor was born and raised, each had three parents - a father, a mother and the Catholic Church, and each of them abused her.

She was one of the first prominent artists to raise the miracle of rebellion against this establishment, and even if she lost personally, she won in the national sense - Ireland recently recognized the church's historic crimes, and repealed its abortion laws, some of the strictest in the Western world.

O'Connor is responsible for what are perhaps two of the most powerful moments in the world of contemporary music / culture: when she tore to pieces a picture of the Pope live on Saturday Night Live, and as a result had to face deafening boos in a tribute show to Bob Dylan she attended but refused to leave the stage.

Nothing will match.

From "Nothing Compares" (Photo: Courtesy of the Sundance Festival / Andrew Catalin)

More than O'Connor herself, what shakes the film is the reactions to it.

Following all this, and following her refusal to attend an event where the American national anthem was played, Frank Sinatra stated that he would like to kick it.

Joe Peshi stated that he would like to slap her.

Both of these statements were received with laughter and applause at the time.

O'Connor was also one of the first prominent artists to appear on television with baldness.

This, too, as seen in the film, cost her a long streak of sexist bites.

O'Connor, in whatever form she wanted to be, had a mesmerizing and extraordinary charm, wonderfully musical and cinematic.

The film mentions that she is much more than a singer of one hit, if by chance someone chooses her to remember her that way, but he also mentions that her cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares", as the film is called, is not for nothing the song most identified with her - it is one of the most beautiful songs at all times.

The song, by the way, is not played in the film, because Prince's administrators did not allow it.

This is after at the time, according to O'Connor's testimony, Prince violently attacked her out of possessiveness and zeal for his song.

"Nothing Compares" is a movie about a great singer, and little people.

The fire of love

Sarah Dosa's film is about the story of volcanoes Katya and Morris Kraft, who shared their personal and professional lives, and nothing separated them - neither in their lives, nor in their deaths.

The film was screened at the recent Sundance Film Festival and immediately became one of the most talked about names of the event, with nearly one hundred percent positive reviews in Grumbling Tomatoes, a big resonance and a high-stakes purchase deal by National Geographic.

It is easy to understand the source of enthusiasm.

It really is a film that has it all: an extraordinary and larger-than-life romantic story, as if taken from a classic French fairy tale;

A relevant ecological message, which uses the volcanoes to illustrate how we are destroying the earth;

A successful combination of fascinating archive footage and charming animation;

And above all, a soundtrack by Nicola Gooden from the French duo "Air".

As the name implies, "Fire of Love" is a fiery film - one of the biggest docu-films of the year and one of the festival's biggest attractions.

The most romantic there is.

From "The Fire of Love" (Photo: Dokaviv Festival)

Three minutes

Seven recent feature films about the Holocaust have been or will soon be released in Israel.

This critical essay will be joined at the festival by two docu-films on the subject, which continues to occupy us even seventy years after the end of World War II.

The first film is "Eichmann - The Lost Recordings", the intriguing project of a strange rival whose world premiere will open the festival.

This docu-document promises to reveal tapes that will shed new light on the character of the Nazi criminal.

Another film, international in this case, is coming to Dokaviv after making a nice round at prestigious festivals around the world, including Sundance.

This is Bianca Stichter's "Three Minutes," for which he is already guaranteed one prize at the festival - the Yad Vashem Prize, which he will receive at the ceremony in the presence of his editor, Katrina Vertena.

The film is named after all that is left of the Jewish community of the Polish town of Nasjelsk - three minutes shot by David Kurtz in 1938.

The director uses only these archive footage, and each time stops the image and zooms in on a different part of it.

Thus we learn more and more about what was and was lost, and also get an illustration that 180 seconds can contain world content and its fullness.

The whole world.

From "Three Minutes" (Photo: Dokaviv Festival)

Nabalani

Daniel Rohr's documentary, co-produced by HBO and CNN, is named after its protagonist - Alexei Navalny, Putin's most prominent oppositionist.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last January, and has since become even more relevant - in fact, it's one of the most relevant docu-movies imaginable at the moment.

Also because Nabalani, who was already in prison, was sentenced to another nine years behind bars;

And also because the world understood, if it really needed more proof of that, how dangerous Putin was and how brave and important the opposition against him was.

God

The most relevant there is.

From "Nabalani" (Photo: CNN)

Brainwashing: Sex-Camera-Power

Adele Hannel, one of the finest if not the finest French actresses of our generation, announced this week her retirement from the world of cinema because the industry was and still is patriarchal and sexist.

An illustration, she says, can be found in Nina Menkes' project, a kind of combination of a documentary and an academic lecture, which demonstrates through hundreds of excerpts how films divide women over the years.

Prominent among the examples is also "Wonder Woman" starring Gal Gadot, who despite his feminist pretensions, Menkes claims is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

So what are the solutions?

The film has some interesting ideas ,.

And I wish it was not too late to exercise them and not too late to persuade Adele Hanel to return to play.

The Dokaviv Festival will take place between Thursday 26.5 and Sunday 5.6.

For full details, screening dates and ticket reservations see the official website.

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Tags

• Dokaviv Festival

• Alexei Navalny

• Shane O'Connor

• holocaust