Israel gay movie
10 great Jewish LGBTQIA+ films
With a diurnal to go until the launch of this year’s BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Production Festival, the optimal of queer cinema is about to take over BFI Southbank for a 31st glorious year. As JW3, the Jewish community centre in north London, launches GayW3, celebrating the lives of the LGBTQIA+ community throughout history to the present day through film, theatre, song and discussion, and uplifting British-Israeli documentary Who’s Gonna Love Me Now?, backed by the BFI, prepares for its cinema release, now is a great occasion to look help at the leading of Jewish and Israeli LGBTQIA+ cinema.
Gay Jewish characters have been the subject of great films from around the nature, and the list below features films from the UK, France, Germany, the US, and, of course, Israel. A number of British films just missed the list, including Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), in which Jewish doctor Peter Finch enjoyed British cinema’s first male-on-male kiss; award-winning short film Sidney Turtlebaum (2008), starring Derek Jacobi as an elderly male lover Jewish pickpocket and conman; and Lisa Gornick’s latest movie, The Book of Gabrielle (2016), a funny and clear study of a Jewish lesbian wh
Israeli cinema has been more mainstream and gay than subversive and queer. But that may be about to change.
We begin this piece with some trivia. In the past nine years, five Israeli movies grossed more than two million dollars in the US. Now, two million dollars for a small foreign language art film is a lot of money. Rare are the foreign films that reach it, and before 2004 no Israeli film had ever passed that benchmark. The five successful filmmakers who did are: Joseph Cedar with Footnote, Ari Folman withWaltz 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). 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. That makes it, albeit somewhat belatedly, the most successful film class in Israeli cinema history.
We’ve discussed the function of Cedar in Fathom 1, Moreh in Fathom 2 and I hope to write about Folman for Fathom 4, (if my be
The new film ‘Sublet’ explores the US-Israel identity allocate from a queer lens
(JTA) — Eytan Fox’s novel film “Sublet” opens with a slow fade-up on travel photographs of Israel: red rocks in the desert, a young lady smiling with the mud of the Dead Sea on her face, two paddleboarders on clear turquoise water. As the image comes into focus, it becomes clear that we’re actually looking at tourism ads in an airport. The film’s protagonist, Michael (John Benjamin Hickey), glides past with a vague look in his eyes. He does not stare at the images.
Exploring this cultural gap between Israelis and American Jews is new territory for Fox, who has been a major queer voice in Israeli cinema for nearly two decades. His films usually capture identity crises within Israelis: what who they love and how they choose to dwell says about them. This time he’s casting his gaze wider, across the ocean — even as most of the move unfolds in a unattached Tel Aviv apartment.
The protagonist is American, a journey writer for The Novel York Times. His arrival in Tel Aviv provides a chaotic first impression: His sublet is still occupied and messy due to a date mix-up. Its occupant, Tomer (Niv Nissim), a young fi
Michael Mayer’s first feature-length movie has been dubbed the “Brokeback Mountain of Israeli film.” Which isn’t too inaccurate of a comparison, in that it’s about two men having a affectionate, sexual relationship in an environment where you might not typically expect two men to possess a romantic, sexual relationship.
But Out in the Dark—a story about a Palestinian student named Nimer and his Israeli lawyer lover, Roy—is more of a gay Persepolis to Brokeback‘s triple-denim Disney drama. Set against the backdrop of Israeli-Palestinian relations—historically, not the best of relations—it explores the stigma of gay, inter-faith relationships between men from perhaps the two most notoriously opposed countries in the world.
I gave Michael a dial to speak about his film, creature gay in Palestine, and Israeli police corruption.
VICE: Hi, Michael. What inspired you to compose and direct this story?
Michael Mayer: I met a ally for dinner who was volunteering at the gay and lesbian center in Tel Aviv, and he told me about the help they offered to Palestinians hiding illegally. First of all, I never knew about that. We chose