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The subject of married gay men struggling with their sexuality in ultra-religious settings is not a new one to cinema. Among others, Jayro Bustamente’s Tremors explored the fallout in an evangelical setting and Haim Tabakman showed it playing out against an ultra-Orthodox Jewish backdrop in Eyes Wide Open.

Screenwriter Mindi Ehrlich, who drew on her own experiences within the Hasidic Jewish community for the film, brings a freshness to the subject by focusing on the female perspective of events - meaning it is a close cousin to the Morrocan-set and similarly themed Blue Caftan. It means that this is not just a film tackling the difficulties faced by a gay man to live his own truth in an environment that strictly controls everything, including sex, but also a story of female self-discovery and emancipation.

Bati (Nur Fibak) and Lazer (Uri Blufarb) appear to have a strong marriage. Their conversations are.

“This film is important, but the most important [thing] for us right now is to bring the hostages back home and for the Israel-Middle East conflict to stop as fast as possible,” says Nir Bergman, one of Israel’s most esteemed filmmakers, in a conversation with Variety about his Tallinn competition entry “Pink Lady.”

Bergman, whose credits include the multi-awarded pics “Broken Wings,” Cannes selected “Here We Are” as well as the original Israeli series “BeTipul,” later turned into HBO’s “In Treatment,” has peaceful messages of tolerance and acceptance in many of his works.

His latest drama, “Pink Lady,” running in the official selection of Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival, tackles the topic of hidden sexual desires and homosexuality in an ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem.

The story turns on Bati, a young woman seemingly happy with her husband, Lazer, and their three children. However, cracks in their relationship start...

The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (known as PÖFF) has unveiled the full lineup of its flagship Official Selection, whose 18 features from 23 countries will compete for the coveted €20,000 Grand Prix.

They include 11 world premieres. The jury is helmed by acclaimed German director Christoph Hochhäusler.

Tiina Lokk, the founder and director of the festival, said “the Official Selection Competition has it all! There’s a psycho-thriller that approaches horror, a psychological family drama, and sci-fi genre is represented. The selection is broad, and so is the range of countries. We’re not trying to highlight a certain theme or a particular region, we are free in our choices,” she noted.

Emphasizing the various topics covered, Lokk cites old age, the end of life and euthanasia “perhaps due to the influence of Covid,” domestic violence and war, “not tackled in the traditional form” but rather via psychological dramas.

“Last year there were...

New Direction

One Direction star Niall Horan is set to cameo on rail-themed Channel 4 digital series, “Trainspotting with Francis Bourgeois.”

Produced by Untold Studios, the series sees TikTok creator Bourgeois introduce celebrities to the obscure hobby.

Horan will join Bourgeois for a “day of locomotive escapades” starting at Liverpool Street Station in London – but will a series of train cancelations and delays scupper their plans?

During the episode, which is available from June 14 on Channel 4’s YouTube, Horan reveals a very personal connection to trains, telling Bourgeois that his grandfather was a train driver. Movie buffs will also be thrilled to discover Horan’s grandfather drove the train in “The Great Train Robbery.”

Series Lab Dana Blankstein-Cohen

The second edition of the Sam Spiegel Series Lab, which was established last year by the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School, with the support of Netflix, and artistic consultancy of Hagai Levi...

13 titles in Israeli Competition including eight world premieres.

Docaviv, the Israeli film festival for non-fiction cinema, has set the Israeli films for its 25th anniversary edition including a 13-strong main competition.

The 13 films – eight of which are world premieres – will compete for the best Israeli documentary award.

Scroll down for the full list of Israeli competition films

Docaviv will run from May 11 to 20 this year in Tel Aviv, screening 120 titles across the festival. 350,000 Nis in prize money will be available across the festival, including the 70,000 Nis award for best Israeli film.

World premieres in the Israeli competition include Inbal Perlmutter – If It’s Over,...

This review of “Ahed’s Knee” was first published on July 7, 2021, after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

After winning the Golden Bear at Berlin for his last film, 2019’s “Synonyms,” Israeli film maker Nadav Lapid returns to top-flight festival competition with prickly intensity in “Ahed’s Knee.”

There’s a Cannes connection which could stand him in good stead: His film “The Kindergarten Teacher” debuted in Critics’ Week here on the Croisette in 2014 and was remade by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who now sits on this year’s Cannes jury. She might look upon it favorably, as will festival audiences and certain art-house cinemas, though it’s unlikely a remake will be in anybody’s mind.

“Ahed’s Knee” begins with an audition session in which young women show their knees through ripped jeans and go through various stages of emotion for a camera and an unmoved casting director. We learn that they...

Cynical takes on life as an Israeli citizen have been a staple of Nadav Lapid’s filmography long before a Ptsd-riddled Tom Mercier tried to abjure his motherland to embrace another in Synonyms (2019). Two years after that fulminating film nabbed a Golden Bear in Berlin comes Ahed’s Knee, a vitriolic tirade on the country’s creeping “loyalty” laws that’s possibly Lapid’s most desperate and lacerating to date. The film follows a Tel Aviv director in his forties who travels to a remote village in Israel’s Arava region for a screening of his latest. The man is Y (Avshalom Pollack) and on arrival he’s greeted by a young officer for the Ministry of Culture, Yahalom (Nur Fibak), who’s there to make sure the Q&a will only touch upon a list of “sanctioned” topics. All of this happened to Lapid too, who traveled to the...

Ahed's Knee (2021)In Nadav Lapid’s latest feature, Ahed’s Knee (2021), an Israeli director named Y (Avshalom Pollak) finds himself in the Arava Valley, an arid region south of the Dead Sea. He is there to present one of his films at the invitation of Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a longtime admirer of his work and the Ministry of Culture’s Deputy Director of the Division of Public Libraries. The two go for a walk during the screening; Yahalom later steps away to fetch an official Ministry form that Y has to fill out, wherein he is to specify the topic of the film and the post-screening Q&a. When she returns, he will surreptitiously record her making incriminating statements about not just the form, but the Ministry as a whole. For the moment, however, he pauses to take in the sunset and call his mother, leaving her a voicemail about the...

Filmmaker Y (Avshalom Pollak) with Yahalom David (Nur Fibak), an officer for the Ministry of Culture in Nadav Lapid’s tightly-wound musical drama Ahed’s Knee (Ha'berech)

When I spoke with Antoine Barraud (who cast filmmakers Bertrand Bonello and Barbet Schroeder in Portrait Of The Artist) on Madeleine Collins for New York’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, I brought up Nadav Lapid’s role has in his latest film. In my conversation with the director of Ahed's Knee Nadav told me how it felt to be asked to act and that he was “obsessed” as a young boy with Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s West Side Story and Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ In The Rain, creating thoughts of wanting to become a dancer and have a band.

Nadav Lapid with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I was obsessed with West Side Story and I was also watching Singin’ in the Rain,...

“All you’re about to see is true. Just pay attention to the style.”

Nadav Lapid’s 2021 Cannes Jury Prize–winning film “Ahed’s Knee” oscillates to a different rhythm in a heart-pounding trailer, as IndieWire can exclusively premiere.

“Ahed’s Knee” centers on Y. (Avshalom Pollak), an Israeli filmmaker who travels to a remote village to present one of his films. He soon meets Ministry of Culture officer, Yahalom (Nur Fibak), who calls into question his life’s purpose. Per a synopsis, Y. finds himself “fighting two losing battles: one against the death of freedom in his country, the other against the death of his mother,” with whom he co-wrote his films.

Similar to Y., Lapid worked closely with his own mother, who edited his first three feature films and died soon after finishing Lapid’s critically acclaimed “Synonyms.”

Writer-director Lapid is “Israel’s most vital auteur,” according to IndieWire’s David Ehrlich.

Updated on October 19, 2021 with new additions.

The American Film Institute announced today the full lineup for this year’s AFI Fest, which includes Sony Pictures Classics’ “Parallel Mothers,” written and directed by Academy Award winner Pedro Almodóvar and starring the beloved Spanish auteur’s longtime muse Penélope Cruz. The film will receive a red carpet premiere at the historic Tcl Chinese Theatre on Saturday, November 13. Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” has also been added, and will screen at the Tcl Chinese Theatre on Thursday, November 11.

Other additions to the lineup include buzzy festival titles such as Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket,” Nadav Lapid’s “Ahed’s Knee,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car,” and Apichatpong Weerakethakul’s Tilda Swinton starrer “Memoria.”

The full lineup joins the previously announced world premiere of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s feature directorial debut, “Tick Tick Boom”. The Netflix feature is based on the autobiographical...

Two years on from swooping the Golden Bear in Berlin with Synonyms (one of our favorites of 2019), Nadav Lapid returns with Ahed’s Knee, a fraught and blisteringly sincere tirade on the country’s creeping “loyalty” laws that saw the director once again attempting to articulate the warring contradictions and confusion of life as an Israeli citizen. The film competed in competition in Cannes earlier this month, where Lapid was awarded the Jury Prize (an accolade he shared with Apichatpong Weerasethakul for Memoria.)

Based largely on the director’s own experiences, it follows Y (Avshalom Pollak), a filmmaker visiting Arraba, where he has been invited to introduce one of his earlier films. There he meets Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a young librarian for the culture ministry. Their conversations begin amiably, even flirtatiously, but soon escalate to frank admissions of disillusionment; recollections of a grueling and formative experience in military service; and...

The Souvenir: Part II Cannes, Day 3: early in the festival, late in the night. I began my first dispatch wondering what the films here would have to say about the past two years, and already a few seem to raise questions that we’ve all been forced to wrestle with in these pandemic times. What is it that makes up a community? What does it mean to exist without one? In Nadav Lapid’s incendiary Ahed’s Knee, screening in the official competition, the dilemmas take place on a national scale. Avshalom Pollak plays Y, a Tel Aviv director in his forties who travels to a remote village in Israel’s Arava region for a screening of his latest work. There, he’s greeted by Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a young officer for the Ministry of Culture who’s there to make sure the Q&a will only touch upon a list of “sanctioned” topics.

While the pandemic failed to vanquish awards season in 2020, one key prize was left out of the picture. For many filmmakers, the Palme d’Or is the most revered accolade on the planet, and in 2019, it set the bar high. After Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” won the Competition and went on to commercial and critical success — not to mention that historic Oscar for Best Picture — many expected that it would place renewed focus on Cannes as a major launchpad for international cinema. That didn’t happen in 2020, as the festival canceled its physical edition, but it’s back to business as usual in 2021.

With Spike Lee as its president, the return of the Cannes Competition looks to be one of the most unpredictable in years. He’s joined by an international group of filmmakers and actors, mostly women, whose work suggest a wide array of sensibilities in play: The other directors are Mati Diop,...

It’s always interesting, at the beginning of any Nadav Lapid film, to note the myriad Israeli institutions that have backed the project. Since Emile’s Girlfriend (2006), Lapid’s work has sought to make sense of Israeli society—his criticisms a byproduct of attempting to articulate the confusion and warring arguments in his own head. Having won Berlin’s Golden Bear with Synonyms in 2019, Lapid could claim to be the most renowned Israeli filmmaker of his generation. That his work is at risk of falling afoul of that same state speaks volumes about the country’s ever-increasing authoritarianism as a whole.

Further confirmation of that renown came with news that his latest would compete for the Palme d’Or at an already-stacked Cannes. It’s titled Ahed’s Knee, a blistering work of meta filmmaking Lapid shot during the pandemic and that addresses censorship concerns head-on. The film is based on...

He saw his second feature (The Kindergarten Teacher) play at the Critics Week (and be adapted into a U.S remake shortly after) certainly jury member Maggie Gyllenhaal might have been the most in-the-know about Nadav Lapid‘s filmography to date. After recently winning the Golden Bear for Synonymes (there is an inside joke to be found) he was ready for the big stage with his fourth film — Ahed’s Knee which is just as politicized as his three other features. An ode to his creative collaborator/mother, Day 2 would be a soul-crushing drama featuring the unlikeable big deal character of Y played by Avshalom Pollak who befriends (or so we think) Yahalom (Nur Fibak) — despite her lack of knowledge of what Battleship Potemkin might be, this film about a filmmaker is served ice cold.…...

­Nadav Lapid, who won the Berlin Golden Bear for Synonyms, blasts his way into the Cannes competition with Ha’Berech (Ahed’s Knee). Whereas his previous film was about a man searching to shrug off his Israeli identity, Lapid’s latest outing is all about a man confronting his Israeli identity and painfully dissecting what it means to be a man of this country.

As with Synonyms, the character is loosely based on the director’s own personal trajectory, albeit in exaggerated form. In this case, Lapid interweaves the story of a filmmaker on a journey to a far outpost of his country to show his film while simultaneously saying farewell to his dead mother. The pain is raw, whether it’s the pain of his bereavement or the pain that he feels for what his country has become.

The film opens with a motorbike ride through rainy Tel Aviv arriving...

After serving up three very potent films over the past decade, Israeli director Nadav Lapid issues forth a shrill and strident screed in his fourth feature, Ahed’s Knee (Ha’Berech). Undeservedly included in the Cannes competition, this rough and hasty-looking outing is nothing short of a bilious broadside of anger at and resentment toward anything to do with the Israeli government. Its utter lack of shrewd argument or intelligent insight makes the result simply seem like the upchuck of a bitter, extremist mindset.

Lapid’s 2011 Policeman was one of the notable debuts of the last decade, a shrewd and intelligent look at a stand-off between an elite commando unit and some upper-class revolutionaries. Three years later, The Kindergarten Teacher provided an acute assessment of a child prodigy, while Synonyms, two years ago, provocatively observed an Israeli soldier’s extreme attempt to transform himself upon moving to Paris.

Ahed’s Knee,...

There are conflicts within conflicts and crises within crises in Nadav Lapid’s astonishing, assaultive “Ahed’s Knee,” a reckless act of aggression not only against creeping state-mandated cultural oppression, but against viewer sensibilities and about a century of cinematic tradition. Quite possibly brilliant, and very definitely all but unbearable, “Ahed’s Knee” is filmmaking as hostage-taking. If such language seems charged, this is Nadav Lapid: All language is charged.

Words here, as wielded by Y (Avshalom Pollak), the celebrated Israeli film director who, in the course of his visit to a small desert town in the arid Arava region will spray them about like machine-gunfire, are loaded, but never ambiguous. This is a difficult film but not because it works to conceal its creator’s intent. Quite the contrary, it is difficult because we are not usually confronted by seriousness this sincere, by despair this direct.

There is little subtlety here...

Kinology has dropped a new trailer for Ahed’s Knee, the new feature from Israeli director Nadav Lapid, whose Synonyms won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019.

The stylish trailer, which plays over a soundtrack of increasingly frantic violins, shows Avshalom Pollak as Y, an Israeli filmmaker in his mid-forties who arrives in a remote village at the far end of the desert to present one of his films. There he has a fateful meeting with Yahalom (Nur Fibak) an officer for the Ministry of Culture. Y soon finds himself fighting two losing battles: one against ...

Kinology has dropped a new trailer for Ahed’s Knee, the new feature from Israeli director Nadav Lapid, whose Synonyms won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019.

The stylish trailer, which plays over a soundtrack of increasingly frantic violins, shows Avshalom Pollak as Y, an Israeli filmmaker in his mid-forties who arrives in a remote village at the far end of the desert to present one of his films. There he has a fateful meeting with Yahalom (Nur Fibak) an officer for the Ministry of Culture. Y soon finds himself fighting two losing battles: one against ...

The first decade of Nadav Lapid’s career has been a rapid ascension to the top.

The Israeli filmmaker premiered his debut feature at Locarno (2011’s Policeman), became the hit of Cannes Critics’ Week in 2014 with his The Kindergarten Teacher (later remade with Maggie Gyllenhaal in the lead role), and then landed the prestigious Golden Bear in 2019 with Synonyms.

Now, he is appearing in Cannes Competition for the first time with Ahed’s Knee, the ostensibly simple, and once again autobiographical, story of a filmmaker (played by Avshalom Pollak) on a trip to a small Israeli desert town to accompany a film screening. Once there, he encounters Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a worker for the Ministry of Culture who acts as his local guide, but he suspects may have a more sinister agenda via a letter she asks him to sign.

As you’d expect from Lapid, the film contains some...