Films on filmmakers will be at the heart of documentary conference entitled Cinema as a Rumour: in memory of Assi Dayan at the Jerusalem Film Festival on Wednesday.

The annual conference, which is in its third year, is organised by the professional body the Israeli Documentary Filmmakers Forum, the festival and America’s Duke University.

“The aim of the conferences is to put the spotlight on documentary topics that are rarely examined in an academic way. There’s a lot of focus on films about the Holocaust and Middle East conflict but films about other subjects rarely get studied,” explained filmmaker Orna Raviv, one of the organisers of the event.

The conference is being dedicated this year to Israeli actor and filmmaker Assi Dayan, who passed away in May. There will be a discussion about the documentary Life as a Rumor [pictured] as well as a TV series about his controversial and sometimes tempestuous life.

Other films up for discussion will include The Go-Go Boys, about legendary Israeli film producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, and Rohmer in Paris, examining New Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer’s fascination with the French capital.

Film academic and director of Rohmer in Paris Richard Misek will give a talk entitled “Making Films out of Films: Notes from the fringes of legality”.

Other speakers include Duke University professor Yael Munk, who will examine works on Dayan in a paper entitled Death and the boy: auto-fiction or Assi Dayan’s documentations of death.