Danae Elon

Kostas, a 75-year-old diver, makes his living raising toxic shipwrecks from a polluted seabed. As the community around him dreams of environmental renewal, an ancient Greek underworld myth resurfaces through a doomed vessel he vows to save. When a long-buried secret from Kostas's past unexpectedly emerges, the mission collapses, triggering an existential reckoning. Moving between ritual, memory, and decay, the film becomes a journey into the shadows of both the natural world and the human soul-where truth, guilt, and the possibility of healing finally surface.

Rule of Stone is a documentary film that exposes the power of architecture and the role it has played – aesthetically, ideologically and strategically – in the creation of modern Jerusalem after the 1967 war.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, Danae Elon’s parents, noted Israeli author Amos Elon, and former correspondent and literary agent Beth Elon, hired a Palestinian man named Musa, the father of eleven children, to take care of their six month old daughter on a daily basis. It was a job he would continue for the next twenty years until she was grown and he was able to save enough money to send all eight of his sons to America for education and career opportunities. The last time Danae saw Musa, in 1991, he proudly showed her the house he constructed in the Palestinian village of Battir. Then, against the mounting tensions of the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian Intifada, the two families lost track of each other. During that time Danae began to realize how much of an influence Musa had on her life and sought to reconnect with him. Her quest led her from her home in New York to Paterson, New Jersey, then to Battir in the occupied territories, and back to her birthplace in Jerusalem.

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In close proximity and yet without any points of contact: In the West Bank, Israeli settlers and Palestinian farmers live next door to each other - and yet in separate worlds. Omar takes his Palestinian family from their town house to the barren slopes of Mount Hebron, where they are supposed to help look after his sheep farm. The Jewish settler Avidan has settled in the immediate vicinity with a group of like-minded people in order to raise sheep in the desolate land. Avner Faingulernt documents these hermetic worlds in a radical but logical form: as two separate films that only unfold their full effect when viewed as a diptych.

Dramatic and deeply personal film about the psychological impact of killing on the lives of five soldiers. Representing a cross section of nationalities, gender, class and race, these soldiers reveal intimate memories about the central act of war, the killing of another human being. How do these individuals make sense of what they have done? What happens when time challenges their carefully constructed stories? Consciously apolitical but deeply psychological, Hidden Battles examines the strength and struggles of men and women who kill and how they create a life for themselves afterward.

Returning to her hometown of Jerusalem with her young family after several years abroad, documentarian Danae Elon offers an intimate, ground’s-eye view of one of the most fiercely contested cities in the world.

A Sister's Song is the intimate, delicate story of two sisters Marina and Tatiana, who live separated by a choice that Tatiana made when she became a nun.

A psychological journey across today’s Poland that weaves together stories of Poles living on Holocaust sites. Through a series of intimate encounters, this poetic film looks at the unsettling contradictions people learn to live with.

The Israeli-Palestinian question is here addressed through the lens of the mother-daughter conflict faced by filmmaker Danae Elon. Settled on an isolated farm in Israel, her mother, Beth, must move to Montreal, but she clings to her past life as an activist alongside her now-deceased husband, while her daughter wants to leave behind her military past and the decisions that led her to reject her country, as her parents did before her. This exploration of her family history leads her to a reevaluation of her relationship with Israel.

"Jaffa Gate Is Ours!" screamed the headlines in 2005. Greek Orthodox Patriarch Irineos was accused of selling church property to Jewish settlers. He denied all the accusations. But for the first time in the church's 2000-year history, its leader was ousted. For 11 long years, Irineos was imprisoned in his chambers. In this first-person account, filmmaker Danae Elon unravels what really happened to the former Patriarch. With unprecedented access to the inner workings of the church, a riveting, mysterious, disturbing, and often humorous story is revealed about an unknown world within the walls of Jerusalem's Old City.