As an openly gay filmmaker, and a vocal spokesperson for gay rights in Israel, five of the six films Fox has directed have dealt directly with gay characters and issues. The Bubble painted Tel Aviv as an eternal escapist party-town, until the bubble is shattered by a suicide bombing.įox is also one of the only mainstream directors that has dealt directly with gay subject matter. Walk On Water dealt with the memory of the Holocaust in present day Israel, depicting youngsters who prefer to block out the memory and who consider Germany a safe haven for Israeli students and artists. The two best known films in his career – Walk On Water in 2004 and The Bubble in 2006 – were light entertainments with tragic undertones. This change in mood is not uncharacteristic for Fox, who oscillates wildly between happy and sad, heavy and light, sometimes within a single movie. Two films in less than a year is a rare feat for an Israeli filmmaker, let alone two good films that are also so radically different in tone. His latest film, the upbeat and optimistic Cupcakes (‘ Bananot’), is currently in Israeli theatres just 11 months after his previous film, the devastatingly sad Yossi(a follow-up to his 2000 film Yossi & Jagger), screened at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
After a six year hiatus, following the domestically ill-received The Bubble, Fox bounced back this year. With his keen eye for blending pop and politics, Fox has been one of the most successful Israeli directors with international audiences. But this time we’re talking about Eytan Fox. We’ve discussed the work of Cedar in Fathom 1, Moreh in Fathom 2 and I hope to write about Folman for Fathom 4, (if my bet is correct, The Congress, Folman’s follow up to Waltz With Bashir, will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May). That makes it, albeit somewhat belatedly, the most successful film class in Israeli cinema history. Now, here is the crazy part: three of those five filmmakers – Folman, Moreh and Fox – are graduates of the same class from the Tel Aviv University Film school (my Alma Mater as well), where they started their studies together in 1986. The five successful filmmakers who did are: Joseph Cedar with Footnote, Ari Folman with Waltz With Bashir, Eran Kolirin with The Band’s Visit, Eytan Fox with Walk on Water and most recently, Dror Moreh with The Gatekeepers (crossing the two million dollar threshold is even harder for a documentary). Rare are the foreign films that reach it, and before 2004 no Israeli film had ever passed that benchmark. Now, two million dollars for a small foreign language art film is a lot of money. In the past nine years, five Israeli movies grossed more than two million dollars in the US. U.Israeli cinema has been more mainstream and gay than subversive and queer. Marco Berger turns his unparalleled eye for the male form to one of the world’s largest displays of masculine bodies- a traditional South American Carnival. Both come from completely different worlds, Janik’s.Ī documentary about a real-life couple, Paco and Manolo, two Catalan photographers from the outskirts of Barcelona, who have been together for thirty years. Janik and Samuel are extremely close best friends celebrating the end of their Senior year of high school. Umut is a young water polo player- a gentle & quiet high school senior, just trying to live his life in a complicated world. Despite arriving to the warm embrace of his sister, Moi struggles to c. Moi travels with his boyfriend, Biel, to his family home after the death of his mother. In a high-rise apartment in Paris, four men and a woman gather to share their experiences of a man that they have all been involved with, fell in love with, and. ‘Down In Paris’ follows Richard Barlow, a filmmaker, who, after experiencing an unexplained anxiety attack on the set of his latest film, wanders in to the. ‘The Sea’ tells the story of Lorena and Diego, a couple who, upon moving to the coast of Chile, find their relationship tested when Diego begins to develop.
His weightlifting obsession is driven by his mother J. At sixteen, David is much like any teenager, but his boyish good looks rest upon a hulking, muscular body.