Screenz Live, an Israeli online platform devoted to learning and personal enrichment, is presenting a master class with Israel’s master writer/director Avi Nesher on screenwriting. Nesher will be interviewed by his daughter, Tom Nesher, an aspiring filmmaker and television journalist. The nine-episode class is free for Screenz Live subscribers and costs NIS 420 for those who are not members of the platform. A subscription to Screenz Live is NIS 99 per month. Like the US-based MasterClass series, the Screenz Live Master Class allows participants to watch the classes on all kinds of devices. The sessions are recorded and participants can view them more than once. They are in Hebrew.Tom describes the course as her father passing on the “Torah of cinema” to her, and while that description is tongue-in-cheek on one level, on another it is quite serious.
Nesher is one of Israel’s leading filmmakers and has been for more than 43 years. He made the iconic musical dramedy The Troupe (Halehaka), about an IDF entertainment troupe, when he was only 24. It was a huge hit and he made several more hit movies in Israel, then spent about 15 years in Hollywood, making popular genre films starring such actors as Drew Barrymore and Joe Pantoliano. He returned to Israel in the early 2000s and made seven movies that were key in revitalizing Israeli cinema, including Turn Left at the End of the World and The Matchmaker. His most recent film, Image of Victory, currently in theaters, is an anti-war epic about the War of Independence that mixes tragedy and comedy in a fact-based story of Jewish and Egyptian young people in the Negev.