David Deri

The story of Israel's "development towns" in a chilling documentary, as never told before: Testimonials and previously sealed transcripts reveal a method, an ideology and a cruel practice of law enforcement and decision makers behind the "population dispersal" policies in the first two decades of independence. The director's family, like others, was taken to Yeruham, a development town in the Negev desert. Their personal stories recount of the price immigrant-families pay and the price still paid by Israeli society, unwilling to deal head-on with those early years and forgotten towns.

A Jewish detective story in the Alps revolving around the former President of the Jewish Community in Tyrol, Ernst Beschinsky. A man with this name dies twice – once in 1969, in Israel, and a second time in 1987, in Innsbruck. This goes unnoticed, at first. In 2010, when a relative in London leaves a house as inheritance, the question arises both in Israel and in Innsbruck: Who was Ernst Beschinsky really? A true story, told by numerous forged documents and many authentic reports.

Say Amen is a personal documentary film by David Deri, an Orthodox Jew, who reveals his homosexuality to his parents and siblings. David is the youngest of ten siblings in a close-knit Moroccan-Israeli family. While other nine have all extended the family tree by marrying and having children, David, at twenty-nine, still hasn't brought home a girlfriend, which inspires his family's constant nagging. The confessional film follows David as he takes small steps, gathering courage, and hoping to receive acceptance from his family.

The story of Israel's "development towns" in a chilling documentary, as never told before: Testimonials and previously sealed transcripts reveal a method, an ideology and a cruel practice of law enforcement and decision makers behind the "population dispersal" policies in the first two decades of independence. The director's family, like others, was taken to Yeruham, a development town in the Negev desert. Their personal stories recount of the price immigrant-families pay and the price still paid by Israeli society, unwilling to deal head-on with those early years and forgotten towns.

Achmed Hamdoon, a young Arab Bedouin of the Hamdoon tribe, was raised in the family tin hut, a few meters away from the locked gate of Kibbutz "Lotem" in West Galilee, Northern Israel. Having longed for the kibbutz life most of his youth, he finally pulls out and moves to "Lotem", changing his name to the typically Israeli name Meidan Sade. The clan is outraged and sees him as a "traitor". But Meidan, no longer Achmed, feels he cannot access better opportunities in the Israeli society as a Bedouin. Indeed, he becomes "the first Hamdoon" to carry ammunition while guarding the Kibbutz, completes his high school...

The creators of Ancestral Sin (TJFF 2018) continue their exploration of discriminatory policies through which Mizrahi immigrants were systemically sidelined by Israeli leadership. Through personal testimonials and recently unsealed transcripts, the filmmakers reveal how newcomers from North Africa were settled into peripheral “development” towns and their children were streamed into vocational schools to provide cheap labour for the state. Despite a concerted effort to keep these newcomers at the bottom of the social strata, the second generation of Mizrahim created a powerful grassroots movement to protest these policies. By aligning with Menachem Begin and the Likud party, they initiated sweeping political change. (Creators: David Deri, Ruth Yuval, Doron Galezer)