Capsule Project makes short films available for a mass audience
Anew cinematic initiative, the first of its kind in Israel, called the Capsule Project, will bring short films to the big screen.
Israeli short films are generally excellent, are made by graduates of the country’s top film schools and star Israel’s leading actors, but until now, they were rarely screened outside of film festivals. The Capsule Project is coming to remedy that situation. It will screen new short films in major movie theaters, by such leading directors as Erez Tadmor (Magic Men, Strangers),
Hagar Ben Asher (Dead Women Walking) and Tawfiq Abu-Wael (Thirst). The actors include some of Israel’s most famous performers, such as Evgenia Dodina (One Week and a Day)
and Hadas Yaron (Fill the Void, Shtisel).
The Capsule Project was started by Green Productions, co-founded by Gal Greenspan and Roi Kurland, one of the most innovative and successful production companies in Israel. Green Productions has made many acclaimed movies, including Scaffolding, by Matan Yair.
The Capsule Project was curated with project managers Daniel Susz and Elinor Nehemia. The aim of the project is to enable these wonderful short films to reach a wide audience.
“We want to create new viewing habits for the Israeli audience and for short Israeli films all over the country,” Kurland said. “We believe that it is time to pave a significant path and expose the public to short Israeli films.”
This is the second project created by Green Productions, which was established to create a platform for watching short films on the big screen. In 2012, Green Productions collaborated with cinematheques throughout the country as part of the First Course project, in which short films were screened before Israeli features. Now, short films will be front and center, with each screening – a “capsule” – consisting of three short films grouped under a certain theme. The first capsule, which was just launched at the end of October, has the title “Love / Hate.”
“The short film has long been more than just a student medium,” says Greenspan. “This is a format that allows for originality and boldness and for that reason has for years been popular around the world.”
The Capsule Project was produced with the support of the Nesher Multicultural Film Fund and will be distributed in the Lev Cinemas chain and the cinematheques.
The first film in the Love/ Hate Capsule is Atara Frisch’s A Love Letter to My Platoon Commander. It stars Gili Beit-Halahmi, Ravit Dor and Shir Abramov, and it won honorable mentions at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and the Jerusalem Film Festival.
It tells the story of Noa, a commander in charge of new recruits in the IDF, who receives an anonymous love letter from one of her female soldiers. Noa faces a dilemma as she decides how to deal with the letter and how to decide whether it is genuine or a prank, as her duty to adhere to the rules of military discipline comes into conflict with her longing to feel loved, if only for a moment.
Ines Moldavski’s The Men Across the Fence, which won the Golden Bear Award for Best Short Film at the Berlin International Film Festival this year, is a documentary about a Jewish woman who contacts men from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip through dating sites and sets off on a journey through the Palestinian territories that has as much to do with gender and sexuality as it does with politics.
Shira Porat’s Who Do You Love More? stars Evgenia Dodina and Hadas Yaron as a mother and daughter whose relationship changes when the daughter finds a new boyfriend.
It’s impossible to overemphasize the high quality of Israeli short films. There have been so many times when I have seen an excellent short film and noted the director’s name, only to find out a couple of years later that he or she had made a major feature film. For example, as long ago as 1990, I saw a film about an Israeli soldier at a gay and lesbian film festival in New York called After by a young director named Eytan Fox, who soon went on to become one of Israel’s leading directors. Talya Lavie, who directed Zero Motivation, the movie about female IDF soldiers that won the top prize at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2014, made a movie when she a student at the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film called The Substitute, about a suicidal soldier, that was very much a blueprint for Zero Motivation. It even starred Dana Ivgy, the actress who went on to win an Ophir Award in that film. Lavie also directed a wonderful short film that has become a cult classic called Shibolet beKafe, about a cafe at the Mifletzet Park in the Kiryat Yovel neighborhood in Jerusalem where a klutzy waitress has to slide down the monster’s tongue to serve her customers.
However, outside of film festivals, audiences rarely get to see these movies. So for any movie lover interested in seeing the newest star directors of Israeli cinema, the Capsule Project will provide a great opportunity.
The schedules and details of the upcoming Capsules will be available via the Lev Cinemas websites and the cinematheques.