Effi Atad

A Thousand and One Wives

The Bukharan neighborhood of Jerusalem in the 1920s Naftali is a wealthy trader and a middle-aged widow whose all his former wives have mysteriously passed away and he is afraid to remarry with a belief that he has a curse on him. The matchmaker presses and the old woman coaxes and finally carries Flora, a 24-year-old virgin, but not to infect her with a curse, he avoids any physical contact with her. The plot gets complicated when Flora gets hurt as a result of her relationship with the fabric merchant, and Naftali, who can't bear the shame, turns his anger on his young wife.

Dissolves

In December 1987, the (first) Palestinian Intifada broke out and the Occupied Territories were set alight with a mass wave of demonstrations, protesting the ongoing Israeli occupation – the largest scale, longest-running ones seen in the area since 1967. The IDF was sent in to quash the uprising and before long, TV screens across the country were inundated with footage of burning tyres, stones thrown about, and baton-wielding Israeli soldiers chasing after teens and children. In the face of this new reality that made the question of the Occupied Territories the single most pressing issue of the time, the Jerusalem Film Festival went ahead and commissioned the following project. The result is a classic, Heffner-esque film – an intelligent labyrinth containing the most fundamental of Israeli tropes: The Holocaust; Arabs; us vs. them – all of which find themselves clashing and intermingling, and ultimately rendering the viewers helpless and cringing with awkwardness.

Young Love

While his parents are on holiday, Huey and his buddies borrow their car and go out. After pursuing a gang of girls, Huey crashes the car, and discovering that the repairs will cost a small fortune, the boys must get jobs to pay for the repairs before Huey's parents get home. The boys all land jobs as porters in the Beachfront Hotel, where their minds are taken off their problems by girls!!