Avi Chai Foundation

Eighteen-year-old Shira is the youngest daughter of the Mendelman family. She is about to be married off to a promising young man of the same age and background. It is a dream come true, and Shira feels prepared and excited. On Purim, her twenty-eight-year-old sister, Esther, dies while giving birth to her first child, Mordechay. The pain and grief that overwhelm the family postpone Shira's promised match. Everything changes when a match is proposed to Yochay-Esther's late husband-to a widow from Belgium. Yochay feels it's too early, although he realizes that sooner or later he must seriously consider getting married again. When the girls' mother finds out that Yochay may marry the widow and move to Belgium with her only grandchild, she proposes a match between Shira and the widower. Shira will have to choose between her heart's wish and her family duty. She will find out that the void which she must choose exists only within her heart.

A young officer returns to his base after a daring mission. The cook's assistant, a religious Holocaust survivor, is envious of him. He believes that there is a place in heaven reserved for the brave officer who endangers his life for the sake of his Jewish brethren. The officer, in the spirit of the Zionist ethos, is secular and a non-believer. At the moment, he is so hungry that, for a plate of shaksuka, he is prepared to sign a contract transferring his secured place in heaven to the cook. Some forty years later, the present time of the movie, the tables have turned - the officer, now a retired general, is on his death bed in the hospital. His son who, to his father's horror, has found religion, is in a race against time. Before his father dies, he has to find that cook's assistant who, forty years earlier, bought his place in heaven. If and when he finds him, the son has to nullify the contract. If he doesn't, his father will go to hell.

Menachem, a former frontman for a rock band, is now religious, and a father to a six-year-old. When his daughter is diagnosed with cancer, he must find a creative solution to fund the expensive treatments. He reunites his band for one last tour. The journey to save his daughter exposes old wounds and allows him to reconnect with his secular past. Menachem understands that only a new connection to his past and to his music can pave the road to his own redemption.

In a little Jerusalem apartment, surrounded by dolls and cats, Miriam Yalan-Shtekelis wrote children’s songs that have captured hearts for many generations of Israelis: The Doll Named Zehava, The Soap that Cried a Lot, Michael, and many more. The director, photographer, editor, designer and writer Reuven Brodeski created the atmosphere of a Russian legend about Yalan-Shtekelis, using miniatures that he fashioned himself for the film, interviewing people who knew her, and telling the story of Israel’s most important figure in children’s literature.

By the age of thirty he’d already become the most famous poet in the Jewish world. He spent very few years living in Tel Aviv, but he loved the city dearly. Some 100,000 people attended his funeral in 1934. “King of the Jews” is a portrait of the most beloved Jew of his day, Chaim Nachman Bialik. Combining special animation, a voice track by Chaim Topol, rare archival footage, long-forgotten photographs, poems by Bialik performed by Ninet and interviews with the foremost Bialik researchers and fans in Israel and around the world, this film retells the story of the little boy from the shtetl, who became King of the Jews.

No one knows his real name; he is only known as Mr. Shoshani. He was an eternal nomad, a mad genius, who attracted disciples such as Nobel Prize winner Eli Weisel and renowned philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Mr. Shoshani is one of the unsolved riddles of the 20th century, he is among the 10 most mysterious people of all time.

Very few details are known about Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, but 400 years after his death, Shabazi is as popular as ever and is considered one of the greatest Yemenite poets. The film takes the audience on a journey through the extraordinary life of one of the greatest Hebrew writers.

She lived in Cairo, Paris, and New York, but died in an old-age home in Givatayim, Israel. She was charismatic and admired, but only a few people actually knew her well during her life. She was the first to write of Levantine and Mizrachi identities, Director Rafael Balulu goes on a journey in the footsteps of “Levantine thinker” and author, and through encounters with her friends in Paris, with intellectuals in the Mizrachi discourse, and with Levantine artists, he not only draws a portrait of this impressive thinker and writer, but also chronicles the trajectory of Levantine identity in Israel as a cultural option.

Rabbi David Buzaglo was the greatest Hebrew liturgical poet of the twentieth century. Born in Morocco in 1903, his literary output had a major impact on a community of hundreds of thousands of people. From his prolific period in the Diaspora to the years he spent in a ruptured Israel, Buzaglo's poetry initiated an abrupt shift in Sephardic liturgical writing, but it also served as a vital link between the modern era and a tradition that dates back to Spanish Jewry's Golden Age. But Buzaglo was more than just a great poet. The actions he took at seminal moments in history had a critical impact in shaping the identity of Maghreb Jews. This film is an intimate look at Buzaglo's life and career, from its roots in the rich tradition of Hebrew poetry in Morocco through the liturgical revolution in Israel.