Roni Keidar’s Family wins top honours and $50,000.

The Jerusalem Film Lab, organised by the Sam Spiegel School of Cinema and Television, chose two out of the 10 projects which reached the finals this year, to be awarded by the Beracha Foundation. The ten candidates, each working on their first or second project, had been tutored for 7 months in Jerusalem and via the Internet by professionals around the world.

Both winners in the 2013 are Israelis. First prize and a cheque for $50,000 went to Roni Keidar’s Family to be produced by Mosh Danon, while the second prize worth $30,000 was handed to Danny Rosenberg’s The This Soldier, which Rosenberg will direct for producer Eylon Ratchkovsky.  

The president of the 2013 jury was Paris-based Portuguese producer Paolo Branco, assisted by Cannes’ Christian Jeune, ARTE fiction head Olivier Pere, Manfred Schmidt of the Mitteldeutsche Mediaforderung, Toronto programmer Jean Schoettle, Sabina Neirotti of the Torino Filmlab and Israeli producer Assaf Amir.