Osnat Trabelsi

Fadhumo and Helen are two refugees, one living in Tel Aviv and the other in Berlin who are asking for asylum. While they both try to cope with a life full of discrimination and alienation away from home, they become determined social activists to help women who live hard lives like themselves. The documentary shot by Efrat Shalom Danon and Gili Danon provides a realistic point of view to the unstable lives controlled by the government policies, to Israeli and German immigration policies, and, despite all this, to the lives of people who dream while standing on their kindness.

So many Israelis still wax nostalgic about that old Friday afternoon ritual, back in the times when television had just one channel. Everyone would watch the Arab movie of the week, but did anybody ever wonder how Israel’s official TV station was able to transcend hostile boundaries to obtain these films, and why it insisted on showing movies made by “the enemy”? The Arabic-language movie from Egypt let some of us escape back to our original homeland, and let others peek out from our “villa in the jungle” and catch a glimpse of our neighbors across the border. But most of us didn’t really want to see the people whose culture, anguish, and aspirations were reflected on our screens. “Arab Movie” brings us the stars and the songs, the convoluted plots, and that fleeting moment when we shared the same cultural heroes as everyone else in the Middle East. But this film about the richness and intensity of Egyptian cinema also raises some disturbing questions.

Swedish-Eritrean radio host Meron Estefanos produces her weekly program at home in Stockholm where she broadcast, devoted entirely to the hundreds of Eritrean refugees held hostage in the Egyptian Sinai Desert. The Bedouins kidnap Eritreans making their way to Israel and demand large ransoms from their families. We follow Meron in her attempts to turn the tide by calling the hostages and kidnappers alike during her radio show. The film focuses on the stories of two hostages: A) Hiriyti was pregnant when she got kidnapped. We hear the young woman talking with her husband Amaniel in Tel Aviv, who is doing everything he can to free his wife and their baby from the torture camp. B) The ransom for 20-year-old Timnit has been paid, but her brother haven't heard anything from her since her flight to the Egyptian-Israeli border. The battle for Hiriyti's release and the search for Timnit takes Meron to Sinai. There, she stumbles on the marks left by the many atrocities.

Seven years after completing an Israeli Defense Course for female combat soldiers, director Hen Lasker returns to take a deeper look at the place where she first fell in love with a woman. Over the course of 66 days and nights, Lasker shoots a fly-on-the-wall documentary that allows unprecedented intimacy into the lives of the trainees and commanders of the Israeli army. The dichotomy of the innocence of these baby-faced trainees with the heavy burden of military service is a central theme of the film, illustrated in a scene where they discuss losing their virginity while waiting their turn to fire a machine gun. But it is the director’s relationship with Smadar, a breathtaking commander struggling to mask her gentle soul with a strict military persona, which makes the film truly enchanting. The intersection of love, duty, and personal growth thrive through to the film’s surprisingly moving finish.

This is the story of a strawberry who wanted independence. Imagine a story about hope, despair, occupation, globalization and politics all centered on a small red fruit - a strawberry. The mother seedlings come from Israel to Gaza and there in the fields of Beit Lihi the seedlings grow into a red strawberry intended for marketing to Europe. In this fateful year in Gaza, the director, accompanied by the Gazan team, documented the agricultural cycle of growing strawberries. The various stages, the hopes, the disappointments, the political events that immediately affected the lives of the farmers. Between green fields, red fruits, sky and sea, an almost pastoral picture emerges for a moment of farmers trying to find the warmth with hard and arduous handwork of the land. But in Gaza the laws of nature don't rule, the occupation does.