News

All Eyes Off Me and Shake Your Cares Away shared the prize for best Israeli film.

Finnish director Juho Kousmanen’s Compartment No. 6 has won the best international prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival (Jff), with Hadas Ben-Aroya’s All Eyes Off Me and Tom Shoval’s Shake Your Cares Away sharing the award for best Israeli film.

The awards will be presented in-person before selected screenings tonight and tomorrow (September 2-3), with the total sum of the awards at this year’s festival approximately 1,000,000 Ils.

Compartment No. 6 premiered in competition at Cannes and is about a Finnish woman and...

The Jerusalem Film Festival has named the winners from its various competition strands this year, with Juho Kuosmanen’s Finnish drama Compartment No. 6 winning Best Film in the international competition.

“Compartment No. 6 is a cross-cultural road movie – entertaining, clever, and remarkably endearing. This is free cinema, released from confinements, where an entire world exists within a cramped train car and where impossible connections are forged between people from different borders and cultures,” said the jury, which was comprised of Ari Folman, Nili Feller and Shai Goldman. A special mention was also given to Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee.

Compartment No. 6 previously shared the Grand Prix in Cannes Competition with Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero.

Elsewhere, in Jerusalem’s First Feature Competition, Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta won the Gwff Award for Best First Feature.

In the the Spirit of Freedom Competition, the Cummings Award for best Feature Film went to...

Respected Jerusalem project lab is up and running again after two-year hiatus

Israeli filmmaker Netelie Braun has won the ninth edition of the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab for Oxygen, the tale of a mother who takes drastic action when her son volunteers for active duty in Lebanon.

It will be writer and director Braun’s first fiction feature after documentary Hope I’m In The Frame, about pioneering female director Michal Bat-Adam, and a number of short films including The Hangman, about the man who hanged Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

Braun describes the feature as ”a political film,...

Massoud Bakhshi’s Yalda wins two prizes at the event.

Production awards worth more than €470,000 were handed out at the 2016 TorinoFilmLab Meeting Event (Nov 23-25), held within the Torino Film Festival.

Three films were awarded Tfl co-production awards worth €50,000 each; Danielle Lessovitz’s Port Authority; Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever and Massoud Bakhshi’s Yalda.

Yalda also took home the audience award, voted for by attendees at event, worth €30,000.

Tehran-born Bakhshi’s feature debut, A Respectable Family, premiered at Cannes in 2012.

The international jury, which was chaired by the Venice Film Festival’s Artistic Director Alberto Barbera, also awarded production awards worth €40,000 each to three films; The Guest by Duccio Chiarini; The Orphanage by Shahrbanoo Sadat and The Staffroom by Sonja Tarokić.

New award

A new prize this year was the Lago development award, worth €5000, which went to Jan-Ole Gerster’s Imperium.

Apprentice by Boo Junfeng, Felicity by Alain Gomis, Jesús by [link...

Exclusive: Shoval [pictured] was mentored by Iñárritu on the set of The Revenant.

Oscar-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu has boarded Israeli film-maker Tom Shoval’s second film Shake Your Cares Away as one of the film’s producers. The film revolves around Alma, a wealthy heiress with a crazy philanthropic streak who takes her charitable work to unconventional extremes when she moves to Israel from Paris.

French actress Bérénice Bejo has signed to play Alma and is studying Hebrew in preparation for the film, which is due to shoot between Paris and Israel in the second half of 2017. “I told her I am searching to cast the soul of my character, Alma, and to my good luck I found it in her,” said Shoval. “I can’t wait for our collaboration.”

Mexican film-maker Iñárritu mentored Shoval as part of the Rolex Mentors and Protégés Arts Initiative. He ended up supporting Shoval and his brother Dan as they co-wrote...

Exclusive: Shoval [pictured] was mentored by Inarritu on the set of The Revenant.

Oscar-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has boarded Israeli film-maker Tom Shoval’s second film Shake Your Cares Away as one of the film’s producers. The film revolves around Alma, a wealthy heiress with a crazy philanthropic streak who takes her charitable work to unconventional extremes when she moves to Israel from Paris.

French actress Bérénice Bejo has signed to play Alma and is studying Hebrew in preparation for the film, which is due to shoot between Paris and Israel in the second half of 2017. “I told her I am searching to cast the soul of my character, Alma, and to my good luck I found it in her,” said Shoval. “I can’t wait for our collaboration.”

Mexican film-maker Inarritu mentored Shoval as part of the Rolex Mentors and Protégés Arts Initiative. He ended up supporting Shoval and his brother Dan as they co-wrote...