Amos Guttman

Amos Guttman's short film follows one evening in the life of a boy who works in a puppet theater. The film, which blends reality with imagination and materialization and hallucination, describes the preparations for the premiere that will take place the day to come, the boy's connections with those around him, his loneliness and his dreams.

After the death of their mother, Thomas and his sister Mariana leave their hometown for a brighter future in the city. They become patrons of a marginal bar in Tel Aviv, Bar 51, whose regulars serve as a backdrop for Thomas’s obsessive love for his sister, and her desire to break free and make a life of her own.

Robi is a young Israeli who lives his grandparents and works at their store. He dreams of finding true love and becoming a movie director, both of which seem increasingly difficult. His film career stalls, until he can get financial backing and his love life seems to be in similar shape. While the urban city has places to cruise for sex, Robi struggles to find an organized gay community and a committed relationship.

Discovering casual sex in a cinema, a high-school student must reevaluate his own gay sexuality.

Guttman's best short film, Afflicted tells the story of a young, closeted Israeli man who visits a drag bar one night in search of sexual expression.

While he was alive, Amos Guttman remained a red flag for the notoriously conservative Israeli film establishment. A Romanian migrant, he, never truly found his place in his new home. He was gay and made the nation's first movies on the subject. He was an artist who wanted to make films not for the masses but for the few. Conversely, he wanted to make movies that connected with the rest of the world and not only Israel – works that maybe Derek Jarman or Pedro Almodóvar could watch by chance and feel understood.

"Fabric Stories", discovered in the Channel 1 archive, provides a snapshot of Israeli fashion — but more than that, it reveals the formative struggles of one of the most important filmmakers to emerge in Israeli cinema. Produced in 1978, five years before Gutman directed his first narrative feature, Drifting, the film appears at first glance to be a documentary about the Israeli fashion scene in the late 1970s. In reality, it is a work that uses the world of fashion as a kind of cinematic language, shifting styles from one scene to the next. This is not a conventional documentary where people speak alongside fashion show clips, but an almost surreal journey into what Gutman himself perceived as fashion. The film’s unique style irritated Channel 1 executives and TV critics, and after a single broadcast, it was shelved. In 2010, thanks to the efforts of Itay Yaakov, the film was rediscovered and restored.

Adapted from Yoram Kaniuk's best-selling novel, this heart-rending love story unfolds during the siege of Jerusalem in 1948. A young and beautiful volunteer nurse is drawn to the enigmatic Himmo, a mortally wounded and mutilated soldier who cannot speak or move.

A drama about two families, each with a gay son. Jonathan is splitting from Miki because the more experienced Miki is playing around. Then Jonathan sees Thomas, the son and grandson of his neighbors, who is back in Israel after failing to make it as a musician in New York: Thomas is ill, detached, in search of hard drugs. Jonathan tries to connect with him. Meanwhile, Thomas's grandmother, facing old age, has become bitter, particularly toward her hard-working daughter. They worry about Thomas. A few blocks away, Jonathan's mother, brother and sister maintain their sometimes bickering relationships, watching Jonathan brave adulthood.

From 1977 to his untimely death in 1993, Amos Guttman directed six films, all of them deeply personal reflections of his own life. Interviews with lovers, family and friends--including some of the most important people in Israeli cinema--tell the gripping story of a strikingly handsome, charismatic and deeply passionate gay man who has become a revered cult figure in Israeli cinema.Interviews with the late filmmaker and fascinating footage of him on the set convey the same passion that comes through in scenes from his films, lovingly selected by documentarian Ran Kotzer. Like Fellini, Guttman transformed his dreams and everyday conversations with friends and family into integral parts of his pictures. He is most remarkable for his striking and original use of the frame. Every shot is a treasure. Amos Guttman dared to portray subjects that were taboo in his society, and his search for the right of individual expression is the connecting link of his works.