Jerusalem shorts directors eye features

Directing duo Ehab Tarabieh and Yoav Gross, whose Berlin Golden Bear nominee Smile, and the World Will Smile Back charts the exchange between a Palestinian family (the al-Haddad family are co-directors) and Israeli soldiers, are planning a Life In A Day-style doc omnibus about life in the West Bank.

As was the case with Smile, participating families will be encouraged to take an active part in the post-production process with camera training also available. Funding is likely to come from B’Tselem.

Recent Tel Aviv Film School graduate Shira Porat, director of short Has Anyone Seen Eyal Nurich?, is on course to renew her collaboration with her award-winning lead actress Hadas Yaron (Fill The Void) in a 40-minute film called Nothing Like Me.

Scheduled to shoot in September the film will chart a troubled mother-daughter relationship and according to Porat could pave the way for a feature collaboration between the two.

The Vow writer-director (and International Women’s Film Festival artistic director) Netalie Braun is in development on an ambitious period drama about Judas Iscariot, while Hadas Ayalon, director of Israeli’s first Student Oscar nominee Paris on the Water, starring Miriam Zohar, is currently editing a documentary about Hannah Arendt and readying her own feature doc about the gay scene in Israel between the 1950s-1970s which could spawn a similarly themed fictional feature.

Magic Men co-writer and co-director Ehrez Tadmor [pictured], who made short Dear God starring Lior Ashkenazi and Reymond Amsalem with regular collaborator Guy Nattiv, is in post-production on anticipated feature Wounded Land.

Magic Men protagonist Makram Khoury stars alongside Yoav Levi, Keren Berger, Tawfeek Barhom, Dvir Benedek and Jamil Khoury in the drama that follows the complex fallout from a terror attack in Haifa.