Oscar-nominated Waltz With Bashir filmmaker Ari Folman has partnered with other Israeli filmmakers for a collective project bringing together testimony from families of hostages kidnapped during the October 7 terror attack by Hamas to urge their release.
Folman and documentary director Jasmine Kainy are spearheading the initiative titled #BringThemHomeNow that is produced by Ophir-winning director and filmmaker Eliran Peled and director Smadar Zamir.
The more than 40 videos of families of hostages were filmed in a studio in Tel Aviv on Thursday October 12 were edited for two days before launching the site online.
“We gathered together very quickly, everyone from the film and TV industry volunteered right away and everyone from researchers, cameramen and women to post-production crews and directors showed up to get to work immediately,” Folman told Screen. The response was so overwhelming that Folman says “there is now a waiting list of industry volunteers ready to get to work.”
Filmmakers including award-winning documentary feature director Nati Adler have stepped behind the camera to support the initiative. Since the original studio shoot, exterior crews continue to travel to areas outside of Tel Aviv to interview other families for further testimonial videos.
The videos are available in English, Hebrew, German, French, Spanish and Italian and can be used on all audiovisual or social media platforms.
In addition to local support from the Israeli film industry, Folman is also hoping the reach of the videos will extend throughout the global theatrical distribution circuit.
“It would be incredible if these short videos could be screened in cinemas before long feature films, whether in multiplexes or arthouse theatres.”
However, as the war escalates, while more than 40 videos have been produced, “at least five have since been deleted because since we filmed them, their bodies have been found.” He added: “Such news is devastating for all of us.”
Folman made clear: “We believe that the war itself and the civilian hostages should be totally separate from a humanitarian perspective.”
Kainy, who won the Ophir award for her doc series Mental State and whose last film Where Are You Going is about first and second generations of Holocaust survivors explained: “This is not political. It is a human and humanitarian issue.”
When the October 7 massacre occurred it was nearly 50 years to the day since the onset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Folman says he was “ironically working on a film about the Yom Kippur war.” Titled One Thousand Yards There, the live-action fiction feature was meant to kick off in March, but the project has now been paused. “It seems like nothing compared to what we’re going through today,” Folman explained.
Folman is also developing a film adaptation of Russian-born Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov’s satire of post-soviet corruption in Ukraine ‘Death Of A Penguin’.
Folman is best known for his Oscar and BAFTA- nominated, Golden Globe and DGA-winning Waltz With Bashir that he followed with 2013’s European Film Award-winning The Congress that premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight. His last feature Where is Anne Frank, an animated drama incorporating both classic and stop-motion animation about the life of the titular Holocaust victim and diarist, premiered in Cannes in 2021.
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