A super beginning to Jerusalem Film Festival

July 8, 2011 - 11:38 AM by

They didn't show up for the festival but Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams provided the thrills at the opening.

Summer is festival time in Israel, and there’s none more enjoyable than the Jerusalem Film Festival which opened Thursday night.

The festival is a long-standing Jerusalem tradition, now in its 28th year, the result of the efforts of The Jerusalem Cinemateque and its founder, Lia Van Leer, as well as countless other government, municipal and film industry offices and individuals.

And in what has also become a tradition, the festival was launched with a gala evening opening at Sultan’s Pool under the Old City Walls. After a number of speeches and the awarding of Achievement Awards to film historian and writer Nachman Ingber, director Eran Riklis and Hungarian director Bela Tarr, who will be presenting his most recent film, The Turin Horse, the main event of the evening got underway: the Israel premiere screening of Super 8, the American sci-fi hit directed by J.J. Abrams, who created the television series Lost and Fringe, and produced by Steven Spielberg.

Before the screening, Abrams appeared in a video message, welcoming everyone to the festival and introducing his movie with a “Todah raba” and “Shalom.”

Super 8 is about a teen in an Ohio town in the 1970s making a Super 8 zombie movie with his friends when they witness a mysterious train crash that soon turns their sleepy town into the focus of military and supernatural attention. Like a steroid-pumped, crash and burn hybrid of the Rob Reiner classic Stand By Me and the Spielberg classic ET, the film was a perfect choice for the huge outdoor screen and impeccable sound system, riveting the 2,000 people in attendance, who laughed and gasped on cue throughout.

Now that the opening is taken care of, the cerebral part of the festival can get underway. According the Hannah Brown, the film critic at The Jerusalem Post, at least 10 Israeli films will compete for the Haggiag Family Award for Israeli Cinema Best Full-Length Feature, including Jonathan Sagall’s “Lipstick,” which competed at the Berlin Festival; Hagar Ben Asher’s “The Slut,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week; and Yossi Madmoni’s “Good Morning Mr. Fidelman,” which received the prize for best screenplay at the Sundance Festival.
Among the films competing for the Van Leer Award for Israeli Cinema for Best Documentary Film are Dani Menkin’s “Dolphin Boy,” Arnon Goldfinger’s “The Flat,” and David Fisher’s “Mostar Round-Trip.”

Let the screening begin!

Tags: • Category: A New Reality, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Life, Movies 

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One Comment on A super beginning to Jerusalem Film Festival

  1. OUPblog » Blog Archive » Spielberg’s shallow redemption of the ET “other” in Super 8 on Mon, Aug 1st 2011 5:29 PM

    2. [...] a warm summer night earlier this month I sat at the grand opening of the Jerusalem Film Festival in the Sultan’s Pool just below Saladin’s walls, about to see Super 8 projected onto a giant [...]

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