Shimon Finkel

The first feature film produced in pre-state Israel. This newly-restored silent film tells the story of a boy from a Moshav who goes on a daytrip with his classmates and gets lost on the way, having adventures in the Jezreel Valley as well as encounters with Bedouins, an eccentric tourist and various animals. “Today, 78 years after its making,” Ha’aretz film critic Uri Klein wrote recently, “the major interest in watching the film stems from its attempt to deal with the conflict between the collective and the individual.” Upon its initial release, the film was praised by both the public and critics: "A cornerstone for the Hebrew cinema was laid yesterday," announced Doar Hayom after the film's premiere at Jerusalem's Zion Cinema. Released in the USA in 1934 as THE LOST COMRADE, with an added opening sequence and narration in English, as well as songs and snatches of dialogue in Hebrew.

Hanna's War is the true story of Hanna Senesh, a Hungarian-Jewish WW2 resistance fighter, who would become Israel's "Joan of Arc". As a young person, she fled Nazi-occupied Hungary for Palestine, where she was recruited and trained by the British to serve as a commando. After completing her training in Britain, she parachutes into Yugoslavia with a commando team to establish escape routes across the Hungarian-Yugoslavian border for downed British pilots. Her attempts to save Hungarian Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, however, leads to her capture, torture and demise at the hands of the Gestapo and the Nazi-controlled Hungarian police.

Israeli attorney Hanna Kaufman has her beliefs challenged when she is appointed to the defense of Selim Bakri. Kaufman, who was born in the United States to survivors of the Holocaust, has always accepted Israel's right to exist. But she bears witness to some of the costs of its sovereignty when she meets Bakri, a dispossessed Palestinian man facing serious criminal charges who wants the same thing as his supposed enemies: to reclaim his family home.

An Israeli drama

Sherman, who is on trial for murder, is found not guilty thanks to reasonable doubt, however; having stood trial leaves the young felon a changed man. He falls head over heels with his defence attorney’s bright daughter and is even willing to turn his back on a life of crime for her, including walking away from his long-time partner, Jaffan prostitute, Margot. However, the road back to the straight and narrow is not an easy one and indeed, many around hm are wary of this so-called, newly-reformed Sherman.

Boaz, a reserve soldier returns from the battlefield and becomes involved in editing a memorial album dedicated to a friend who was killed before his eyes. He becomes increasingly involved in the lucrative business of producing memorabilia of this kind and does not hesitate exploiting the grief feelings of the survivors and symbolically becomes a "vulture," even in his romance with the dead hero's girlfriend.