Yuri Priymenko

In the empty city of Tel Aviv during the pandemic two strangers cross paths. Their small flirtation hits the most graceful of pandemic humor notes and ends with a satisfying (for those who are bloodthirsty) twist.

Director Oren Gerner ponders aging and family in a time of transition in this inventive quasi-factual feature about an elderly man (played by Gerner’s father) seeking purpose and meaning as the years tick by.

Director Oren Gerner ponders aging and family in a time of transition in this inventive quasi-factual feature about an elderly man (played by Gerner’s father) seeking purpose and meaning as the years tick by.

Manya, newly repatriated from Russia in accordance with the Israeli Law of Return, meets Erez, a native-born Israeli Jew. She soon learns that to be with Erez she must undergo an Orthodox conversion (known as Giyur), even though she and her family already identify as Jewish. The film follows her as she reevaluates her love and redefines her Jewish identity.

Filmed in one sequence-shot of 1 hour and 25 minutes, Ana Arabia is a moment in the life of a small community of outcasts, Jews and Arabs, who live together in a forgotten enclave at the “border” between Jaffa and Bat Yam, in Israel. One day, Yael, a young journalist, visits them. In these dilapidated shacks, in the orchard filled with lemon trees and surrounded by mass public houses, she discovers a range of characters far removed from the usual clichés offered by the region. Yael has the feeling of having discovered a human goldmine. She no longer thinks of her job. Faces and words of Youssef and Miriam, Sarah and Walid, of their neighbors, their friends tell her about life, its dreams and its hopes, its love affairs, desires and disillusions. Their relation to time is different than that of the city around them. In this tinkered and fragile place, there is a possibility of coexistence. A universal metaphor.