As we’ve learned over the past 18 months, art created in the shadow of war loses none of its power and can be more essential than ever, so it’s welcome news that the 16th edition of Epos, the International Art Film Festival, will take place from April 14-19 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Tel Aviv Cinematheque.
The festival shows movies about every category of the arts, including architecture and design, fine arts, performing arts, and literature. Many of the movies will be preceded by a talk by experts, and some will be held in the presence of the directors, who will conduct a Q&A following the screenings.
The festival will open with Glass, My Unfulfilled Life by Rogier Kappers, which tells its director’s unusual story of creating that most fragile instrument imaginable, a glass organ. After quitting his job, Kappers manages to build such an organ and hits the streets with it, still trying to figure out what he wants out of life.
The Literature and Poetry section features an especially varied group of films this year, including 84 Charing Cross Road, directed by David Jones. This film is an adaptation of the epistolary novel by Helene Hanff, which tells the story of a friendship conducted by post between the author (Anne Bancroft), an American living in New York, and Frank (Anthony Hopkins), who runs an antiquarian bookshop in London. It’s a sweet story of an emotional connection that revolves around literature, and book lovers won’t want to miss the chance to see it on the big screen.
Dan Wolman’s 1974 adaptation of My Michael, one of Amos Oz’s most popular novels, stars Efrat Lavie as a Jerusalem wife and mother who seems to have everything going, but descends into madness as her loyal but unimaginative husband (Oded Kotler), looks on. A number of the film’s creators will be on hand at the screening.Looking for Simone, directed by Nathalie Masduraud and Valérie Urréa, explores Simone de Beauvoir’s journey to America in 1947, where she began work on her masterpiece The Second Sex.
The movie The Gulag Archipelago, the Revelation, by Jérome Lambert and Philippe Picard, looks back on that groundbreaking book, published more than 50 years ago, which undermined the faith that many had in Communism and the Soviet Union. This documentary tells the life story of its author, the dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won the 1970 Nobel Prize for literature and wrote the book in secret. It also traces the history of the book, which was smuggled into the West and became hugely influential.
Among the films on music, Misty – The Erroll Garner Story, by Georges Gachot, will be a treat for jazz fans. It tells the story of the legendary jazz pianist Erroll Garner, best known for his song “Misty,” and details his struggles and triumphs.
Derek Jarman’s 1989 War Requiem spotlights a historic recording of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, conducted by the composer himself, which is played here in its entirety while disturbing documentary footage from several wars and other images are shown. Laurence Olivier appears as an old soldier and reads a poem by Wilfred Owen, the soldier known for his anti-war poetry who was killed in World War I at age 25.
Memory Game by Tammy Federman tells the story of a theater group of Holocaust survivors who go on tour with a production that they have written, to process their trauma. Their stories touch young people who see them perform, and they use humor and music to help them cope with the tragedies they experienced.
A highlight of the films on fine arts is the latest movie by Tomer Heymann, Woman Against the Wind, which looks at the life of Ilana Goor, an iconoclastic and successful artist who created sculptures, jewelry, and other works, which made her wealthy. Her success aroused animosity in the Israeli art world, and Goor established her own museum – a home for her works and her collections. At 88, she is fighting for the future of the museum and her legacy.
The documentary Bacon Freud, face à face, by Catherine Aventurier, looks at the two painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, who were close friends in the early 1950s, and examines their lives and their eventual falling out.
A little-known story about a woman who preserved traditional Cambodian dance after the Khmer Rouge movement massacred a quarter of the population is the subject of Pol Pot Dancing by Enrique Sánchez Lansch. Chea Samy was raised in the royal palace in Cambodia, where she excelled in the art of traditional folk dance. She raised her husband’s younger brother as if he were her own son, but that boy grew up to become the brutal dictator Pol Pot, who led the Cambodian genocide and tried to eradicate all art and culture. Samy survived and has made it her mission to teach Cambodian dance to the younger generation.
These are just a few of the movies that will be shown in this year’s rich selection.
To see the full program, go to filmart.co.il/en/home-english.