Pini Schatz

As he turns 50, filmmaker Pini Schatz sets out to explore his life-long obsession with the band Sparks (the brothers Ron and Russell Mael). Pini charts the impact of Sparks on his life while meeting with fellow Sparks fans, among them famous musicians, in Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Rotterdam and NYC. Structured as a personal quest of the filmmaker to prove that Sparks are the coolest underrated band in the history of popular music, this docu-comedy explores the universal themes of growing old and being an outsider, the importance of art in daily life and the power of non-conformism.

A cinematic journey through anxieties and blood. The film maps various concepts connected with blood through recreation of events and personal experiences from the filmmaker's life and meetings with people whose lives or professions are linked to blood and reaches insights of us - as humans, Israelis and Jews in Israel of 2008.

In this documentary, film-maker Pinchas Schatz sets out to determine the fate of his grandfather, a Zionist leader in the former Soviet republic of Estonia between the two world wars. Accompanied by his mother, Margalit, (his grandfather's daughter), they journey back to Estonia where in the summer of 1995, K.G.B. archives and secret files relating to the case were made public. From these and the new testimonies of other witnesses, they are able to piece together a largely unknown chapter in the tragic annals of the Zionist movement in the former Soviet Union, and, more personally, the official verdict against his grandfather for "trying to establish a Bourgeois-Jewish State in Palestine with the assistance of the Capitalist countries.