Dan Geva

The first ever Israeli documentary film to feature an Arab protagonist is revisited 50 years later by top graduates of the Sam Spiegel Film School.

DESCRIPTION OF A MEMORY examines the complexities of Israel's history through the lens of Chris Marker's 1960 film DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE (DESCRIPTION D'UN COMBAT), a portrait of the country made 13 years after its founding. Marker went to Israel as an outsider, looking to discover the spirit of the young country through its "language of signs." He found a place whose unique moral and political obligations could provide a new, humane model of nationhood to the world. In DESCRIPTION OF A MEMORY, director Dan Geva, an Israeli, explores what has happened in his homeland in the years since with a more critical eye, asking whether the promises Marker identified have been fulfilled. Structured by thirteen memories, the film is an open-ended, essayistic meditation on the distance between the ideals that fueled the creation of Israel and the realities of its history.

A documentary comedy narrated by the wife of a man who suffers from hyper-acoustic sensitivity, which makes his life in Tel Aviv, one of the noisiest urban locations on earth, a living hell. Tormented by the belief that they live in an incredibly noisy society, the award-winning couple of Israeli filmmakers resolves to investigate the issue: they install cameras in their house to capture sources of this formidable sonic mass that invades their daily lives. Noise is a reviving acknowledgement of the Griersonian tradition of dramatic treatment and social exclamation for a civil change in the actual world.

Three episodes portray the common historical role which Jerusalem fulfills in Judaism, Islam and Christinity.

A tribute to the classic: “Man with a movie camera”/ Dziga Vertov (USSR 1929). A naïve documentary filmmaker, heavily armed with 3 cameras and a purple draped stage, sets out to roam his beloved country on his cheap motorcycle in order to bring to the screen the ultimate truth of his people. The racist and violent reality reflected from his people’s words increasingly darken his heart and vanquish his dream, until he is forced to confront his deepest fears through encounters with characters drawn from his tormented soul.