The forthcoming jubilee 25th edition of the influential Tel Aviv CoPro market for Israeli productions commences on June 5th. «This year, we received many great applications, and the selection was hard to make. We are very happy to have a very strong line-up this year of both emerging and established filmmakers like Dror Moreh and Tomer Heymann, » reflects Pnina Halfon Lang, the market’s long-time Executive Director. «It’s been 25 years since CoPro began promoting Israeli documentaries worldwide. During that time, CoPro has become a vibrant engine for this ecosystem and a major bridge to the global market. I am proud to have supported numerous successful and award-winning films over the years and excited to continue showcasing fresh stories by Israeli filmmakers.»
Almost fifty documentaries on various stages of production that will be featured in different event strands represent a wide variety of topics, themes, styles, and authors. There are certainly big, explosive political stories covering current events, and their wider, rooted in recent history perspective, like Tomer Sluzky and Jacob Tschernia’s A State of Emergency closely following a high-profile political battle between Benjamin Netanyahu and a young representative of the Israeli left – Stav Shaffir, or Dror Moreh’s thrilling and highly anticipated Dagan, the Deathbed Confessions of a Mossad Chief presenting face to face interviews with Meir Dagan, the Mossad director between 2002 and 2011, conducted in early 2016 at the end of his life. There are also insightful projects focusing on the Palestinian viewpoint, like Tomer Heymann’s (Paper Dolls, Mr Gaga) Issa’s House approaching the Palestinian activists and their non-violent struggle for human rights in the occupied territories, and the deeply moving coming-of-age story of two Palestinian girls in East Jerusalem by a newcomer Bissan Tibi One Street in Silwan.
Traditionally there are a few WWII stories uncovering new aspects of the historical events, prominently a seductive, told as a thriller report on the first political assassination in Israel – of Dr Israel Kastner, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor in 1957. Based on a book by historian Dr Nadav Kaplan the Kastner by Yariv Mozer (Ben Gurion, Epilogue) attempts to bring to light a truth behind a tangled until this day shrouded in secrecy, the history of a person who saved 1600 prominent Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust, but later was accused of collaboration with Eichmann himself. History seems to be, however, often re-examined from a new, encompassing recent ideological developments points of view, which is visible in two film portraits of the major figures who shaped the whole XX century: Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx in Freud Vs. Freud Yair Qedar reconstructs Freud’s inner world through his diaries, home movies, and interviews, focusing on implicit, unexpressed, modulated elements in search of tactics of psychological reinvention in the face of a deep existential crisis. Benjamin Freidenberg presents, in turn, the current dimensions of Marx’s philosophy in The Activist. Karl Marx.
The major part of the program focuses, however, on today’s world and its various regions. Shosh Shalm’s Left Behind Children delves into a world of Chinese children in rural areas left behind by their parents working in the cities. Gad Aisen draws a portrait of the distinguished French caricaturist Michel Kichka combining live-action with animation, sketches, and graphics, while Yakie Ayalon and Jessie Chisi put a spotlight on the social role of the boxing club in Zambia in Exodus Zambia. On a bit lighter note, a new film by Yoav Shamir (Checkpoint, Defamation, 10%: What Makes a Hero), The Amazing Tale of the Peace River Meteorite, in a grand cinematographic style spins a tale of strange occurrences accompanying the meteorite that fell in Northern Canada in 1965.
There are also projects aiming at bringing justice and exposing hidden facts. Especially Sharon Yaish’s Angel of Death is deemed to stir a debate with its extensively documented effects of journalistic investigation into the life of one of the revered Israeli rabbis, who, besides leading a life of a public figure for decades, was committing the heaviest crimes. Never before seen footage is featured in Yigal Amir’s A Journey into a Killer’s Soul, which uses interviews with Yigal Amir, a killer of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, to access the psychology of a man who committed one of the most atrocious world political murders in recent decades.
CoPro Market will also present its Screening Room, showcasing a select few distribution-ready films from their catalog. These films will be available on the CoPro market platform in June and on CoPro Screen throughout the year. The lineup includes In the Name of the Father, exposing a secretive cult, My Project X, delving into the lives of criminals, Silver’s Uprising, exploring a cyber trial, and The Return from the Other Planet, revealing a forgotten message from a famous writer.
As Pnina Halfon Lang observes, «The CoPro market has become the go-to industry event for the Israeli documentary projects, and we are honoured to have dozens of important decision-makers in Tel Aviv year after year.»
