Polish broadcaster follows ARTE-NDR, BBC Arabic, NHK Japan, RSI & RTS Switzerland and RTV Slovenia in acquiring the Israeli/German co-pro The Church from Go2. The company’s DfS slate also includes Living in Paradise (Best Doc, Haifa) and Doc Aviv Best Debut winner Rain in her Eyes.
The church in question is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the holiest Christian site, which is shared by six dominations fighting each other for every square meter. During IDFA, Go2 boss Hedva Goldschmidt is “looking for further collaboration” on the 70/52-minute film which already has nine broadcasters attached, she says. The film is directed by Anat Tel.
A recent pick-up is Haifa Best Doc winner Living in Paradise, by Ofer Freiman, which Goldschmidt describes as a “never ceases to surprise story” about a Brazilian man living within a paradise commune whose children discover that they are probably descended from “hidden” Jews from the 15th Century, at which point the father contemplates emigration to Israel. “It is a crazy fascinating story that really asks questions about the modern world, the tension between nature and progress and the family structure,” says Goldschmidt.
Another film on the Go2 slate is Doc Aviv Best Debut winner Rain in her Eyes by Ron Omer. It tells the story of the story of Israeli Dvora Omer, mother of the director, from the dark secrets of her childhood to her status as national author, and whose writing influenced generations of children. “Her son the filmmaker revisits the events that shaped his life, but our lives too as Israelis,” says Goldschmidt.
The sales supremo also flags up A Lullaby for the Valley by noted journalist Ben Shani who for 10 years has documented the “valley” artist Eli Shamir. But what began as an artistic documentary was transformed when Shamir was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
Four Mothers by Rephael Levin and Dana Keidar Levin is described as a female-driven, grassroots protest movement that takes on the military establishment and challenges the patriarchal society of Israel to stop a bloody war that has been raging for years.
Mordechai Vardi’s Marry Me However explores the lives Orthodox-Jewish LGBT members who willingly choose to marry heterosexuals and raise a heteronormative family, obeying the rules of their societies while denying their own identities.
In Avida Livny’s Murder at Cinema North Avida Livny, the fates of a young criminal, a Jewish engineer, a German music teacher and a Jewish woman who has an affair with a Nazi intersect when a bullet is fired into a queue of people waiting to see a film.
Goldschmidt describes her company’s modus operand/raison d’être. “We mainly distribute and sell Israeli films, and our aim is to widen the lens on Israeli society and the beautiful crazy mosaic of Israeli culture.”
“Israel is a majority of minorities,” she continues, “and there are so many interesting stories to tell that are not directly [related to] the conflict… We also take international titles but they have to have some relation to Israel or Jewish topics, because this is a brand that we have developed for the past 10 to 20 years. It is niche, but it is fascinating when you really dive into our crazy unbelievable reality.”
Post-IDFA, Goldschmidt will be full steam ahead on Muranow, by Chen Shelach and Micha Livne and produced for Hot8 TV. The film’s national premiere is planned for the Jerusalem International Film Festival that was postponed to December 2020.
“Muranow is the neighbourhood in Poland which in WWII was turned into the Warsaw ghetto, and when the war ended it was simply rebuilt with the rubble of its own destruction,” says Goldschmidt. “It’s a film about the young Polish people [now living there} who feel that the past keeps haunting them either as ghosts, or as a metaphor for a life and culture that was buried beneath another culture.”
