Yossi Banai

An English-speaking film produced on behalf of the Israeli Center of the International Theater Institute, providing international audience with an overview of modern Israeli theater, including scenes of renowned Israeli theater productions from the theater season of 1967. The film opens with excerpts from “The Dybbuk” at Habima Theater, and includes scenes from the successful musicals of the Cameri Theater “Utz Li Gutz Li” (Rumpelstiltskin) and “King Solomon and Shalmai The Shoemaker”. Other excerpts include scenes from the plays “The American Princess” by Nissim Aloni at the Seasons Theater, “He Walked Through the Fields” by Moshe Shamir at the Haifa Theater, Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler”, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf”, and more.

Ariel, a young French Jew, decides to leave his family to go to Israel and secretly become an agent of Mossad, the Israeli secret service. After years of training, his first mission is in Paris to steal secrets from Remy Prieur, a French atomic scientist.

Thirteen years after his death, the great Yossi Banai comes to life for one final encore. A cinematic memoir pieced together from numerous archival materials - films, plays, radio shows, songs and stage performances - this personal documentary is led by Banai's deep iconic voice. An actor, singer, writer and director, Banai represented the pure essence and contradictions of Israeli culture: an atheist from a religious family, a native that insisted on importing European motives and a consensual Israeli figure that wasn't afraid to take a political stand. From childhood to death, through love, family and life on the stage, Yossi Banai directs the spotlight on to his own image.

A good-natured but incorrigible layabout becomes embroiled in a plot to rob the Israeli lottery, all the while indulging in his boundless zeal for mischief and romance.

A film about the clash between the patriarchal values of Jewish immigrants from North Africa and modern life.

Aliza mizrahi, the building cleaner, solves a murder where the police fails

A burlesque fantasy about a fountain-of-youth pill and its effects on Getz, a down-and-out Tel Aviv night-club singer. After taking this much sought after pill, Getz becomes the epitome of youthful energy, and therefore a teen idol, a symbol of beauty and youth, up to the cathartic ending of the movie.

A popular wise man/folk healer is anxious to marry off his daughter, but she refuses all his suggested suitors.

A quirky, surrealistic film version of a play by Nisim Aloni about a bride who flees her wedding and a clerk who flees his humdrum existence by escaping to the park every Wednesday afternoon to hunt—and release—butterflies. The encounter between the two takes place in a park.

Directed by Zeev Havatzelet.

The story of the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, in which the 'occupied territories' were won.

Pillar of Fire focuses on the History of Zionism, beginning in 1896, in the wake of Theodor Herzl's revival of the concept of Jewish nationalism and continues to follow the Jewish People in the 20th century, the early stages of Zionism, followed by the waves of Aliyah prior to the founding of Israel, the Revival of the Hebrew language, the Ottoman Empire's rule in over the Land of Israel, the British Mandate, Anti-Semitism in Europe, the rise of Nazism and The Holocaust, the history of the Yishuv, the Jewish struggle for independence, and ends in 1948, with the Israeli Declaration of Independence.