Avi Nesher, one of the most promising Israeli filmmakers of the seventies who moved to US in the early eighties and stayed there for close to 20 years, is now putting the final post-production touches to his first Israeli film since The Rage And The Glory (1984).

Nesher is the writer and director of such movies as Timebomb, Doppelganger, Taxman and recently Ritual, a remake of I Walked With A Zombie, due for release this autumn by Dimension Films.

His new Israeli film was originally known as Mondo Moderno and is now retitled Turn Left At The End Of The World. It is produced by his own company with Samuel Hadida's Davis Films in Paris.

A musical comedy, it tells the story of a number of families who emmigrate from India to Israel in the late sixties, seeking a better life in what they believe to be the first outpost of the West in Asia.

Instead, they are sent to a new settlement, in the middle of the desert, populated mostly by Moroccan Jews. An inevitable cultural clash takes place between the two communities - the Indians who consider themselves British and the Moroccan who see themselves as French.

Upcoming French star Aure Atika, plays the lead, with a mixed French-Israeli-Indian supporting cast. Projected as a December release, the film is in French, English, Hebrew, Moroccan and Hindi, with cinematography by Israel's premier cameraman, David Gurfinkel and music by Krishna Levy.

Nesher is also playing one of the leads in a new, as yet unreleased film, by Shachar Segal, entitled A Small Step. His documentary project Oriental, has also just been granted full production facilities by the Jerusalem Film Festival, with the collaboration of Tel Aviv's Cinema Project and Keshet Broadcasting.

The finished product is to be screened next year in the Festival's Spirit of Freedom section.

Also on his slate, an American project, The Secret, about a Latvian Jew who passed off as an SS officer all through WW2.