Jewish New Year in Toronto — Israeli Films Win

Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian’s The Fig Tree won the Audentia Award for best film by a female director at the Toronto International Film Festival, taking home a 30,000 Euro grant. The Fig Tree produced by Naomi Levari and Saar Yogev from Black Sheep Film Productions is Davidian’s feature debut. It defeated 12 other films and also debuted at the festival as part of the Discovery Section.

Davidian, who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia at the age of 11, filmed the movie in her hometown, Addis Ababa, in Amharic, with a team of local actors. It takes place at the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s and tells of Mina, a young woman who is friends with Ali and meets with him under the fig tree.

Israeli director Guy Nattiv won the Fipresci Jury Award for Special Presentations for his first American film called Skin. Nattiv’s film, who lives in the U.S., is about a neo-Nazi youth who decides to change his life and turn his back on hatred and violence, which he does with the aid of a black activist and a woman he loves. The movie was produced by Oren Moverman and purchased this week by the A24 film distribution company.

Three other Israeli films in the World Contemporary Cinema category this year. Yona Rozenkier’s The Dive, which shared the Haggiag Award for Best Israeli Feature Film at the Jerusalem Film Festival, stars the director and his brothers as three siblings who get together during wartime on the kibbutz where they grew up to honor the memory of their father, a man who made them suffer but taught them to survive. The three Rozenkier brothers shared the award for Best Actor at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and the movie also won an award for Best Cinematography.

The two other Israeli films in the World Contemporary Cinema Competition also premiered at the recently concluded Jerusalem Film Festival. Michal Aviad’s Working Woman, a movie for this #MeToo moment, chronicles the struggles of a young married mother trying to break into the high-end real estate market, who is preyed on by her boss. It was acquired for US by Zeitgeist Films.

Redemption, directed by Joseph Madmony and Boaz Yehonatan Yacov, which won the Audience Favorite Award and a number of other awards at Jerusalem, tells the story of a former rocker who has become religious but needs to get his old band back together to raise money for his daughter’s medical treatment. Its star, Moshe Folkenflik, won the Best Actor Award at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic.

A short film, Old Thing, by Roni Bahat, was shown in the Short Cuts section. It tells the story of a Tel Aviv junk dealer, his son and their horse, who face the end of their way of life.

Highly recommended as “one of the most irreverent cinematic spins on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this latest from writer-director Sameh Zoabi (Family Album, Man Without a Cell Phone, Under the Same Sun) follows a fledging soap-opera scenarist charged with concocting plot twists to suit viewers on both sides.