Short extract from the film will be shown at Jerusalem Film Festival’s Pitch Point.

Tel Aviv-based Transfax is set to unveil extracts today from Guilhad Emilio Schenker’s Madame Yankelova’s Fine Literature Club, about a women’s reading club with a secret feminist and cannibalistic agenda.

The picture is Schenker’s debut feature after his award-winning short Lavan, which toured some 70 festivals.

“I’m curious to see the response. It’s very different from what people normally expect of Israeli cinema, it’s very stylised,” said Transfax founding chief Marek Rozenbaum, adding that the décor and costumes had a period 1950s and 1960s feel although it was not set in a specific time.

A 10 to 20-minute subtitled extract will be shown in a industry work-in-progress session at Israeli feature-focused Pitch Point today at the Jerusalem Film Festival.

Adapted from Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s novella The Mistress and the Peddler, the film revolves around a women’s literary club, which is a front for a weekly competition revolving around who can lure the most attractive man to the event, who is then executed and eaten. Filmmaker Dover Koshashvili assisted Schenker in the adaptation.

Rozenbaum said a first, full rough-cut for the film, shot in the studio in March and April, will be ready in August.

Other upcoming projects on the Transfax slate include Arik Rotstein’s Generation 3, Meny Yaesh’s The Bouncer and Koshashvili’s Love Birds, about a couple who meet up in a hotel room on the 10th anniversary of their marriage as strangers.

“It’s very provocative, there’s a lot nudity and it’s a lot of fun,” said Rozenbaum.

Transfax also produced Keren Yedeya’s That Lovely Girl, which is screening in the Israeli Film Competition.

Topics