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Alma Har’el’s Shortlist

Published on October 14, 2011

The Shortlist article series is your opportunity to learn about the films that inspire intellectual, artistic and activist leaders – leaders like Alma Har’el. We asked Alma to share her favorite films and her thoughts on the power of documentary to change the world.

So what films make Alma’s Shortlist? Keep reading to find out.

Who is Alma Har’el?

Born and raised in Tel Aviv Alma Har’el began her work as a photographer and a video artist. Her live video-art performances with musicians led her to directing music videos and her frequent collaborations with singer Zach Condon of the band Beirut brought her several nominations in festivals around the world, especially their critically acclaimed video for the track ELEPHANT GUN.

Her work is recognized for her expression through modern dance, character and landscape and for her ability to create images with a striking balance of emotions; heavy-hearted as much as they are joyful and playful.

BOMBAY BEACH is Alma’s first feature film and has earned her a place in Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema”. After winning the Tribeca film festival and playing in over 20 festivals around the world, it is getting a theatrical release starting October 14th.

Alma Har’el on the Power of Film

Over the years many have tried to determine the function of dreams. In the science world, theories that directly opposed each other came and went. The influence of dreams on our ability to learn is one of the hottest debates to this day. Some have argued that dreams aid in learning while others argue that dreams aid in forgetting. The same has been said about films. Here is a list of films that helped me learn and remember, in no particular order of importance.

Alma Har’el’s Shortlist:

Streetwise
I saw this film on TV in Israel when I was about 9 and didn’t know what it was, but it left a strong impression on me. While I was editing Bombay Beach my husband and producer Boaz Yakin recommended that I watch StreetWise. It was powerful to see it come to life as if rising from my memories. The film follows the stories of a number homeless children in Seattle and it is set to a Tom Waits score. It has a mood and a life of its own unlike any other doc.

Children Underground
This film is also about the same subject and I saw it on TV when I was living in Tel Aviv with my mom much later in life. It tells the story of lost homeless children who live in the streets of Bukharest in Romania. Some of them get addicted to the chaos and pain of living in the streets, while others are looking for a way out. Each one of the children in the film and the relationships they have with each other will stay with me forever.
Check out the 90-Second Cinema Clip!

Te’alat Blaumlich
Te’alat Blaumlich is one of my favorite Israeli films. It’s a surreal comedy about an escaped lunatic who starts digging up the streets of Tel Aviv with a Jack Hammer, ridiculing the madness and bureaucracy of everyday life in Israel. In the end he manages to turn Tel Aviv into a little Venice with canals and Gondolas. The work of the late writer and director Ephraim Kishon was my introduction to social commentary through the use of surrealism and humor. We had a few of his children’s books at home when I was growing up. In the film there’s a side character of a police officer played by the late Sheike Offir, who was a gifted mime and Israel’s best actor. In 1971 Ephraim Kishon wrote and directed another film centered around this character, named “The Police Man”. The film is about an officer whose tendency to show mercy to crooks has doomed his career in law enforcement.

Brazil
This is one among the many Terry Gilliam films that I love. Apart from his brilliant understanding of the funny and scary madness in this world I am always drawn to his retro-future world of “Brazil”. A place where the soul is the enemy of bureaucracy. I read once that he had an image of a guy sitting on a dirty desolate beach with a little portable radio that plays escapist songs like “Brazil”, the music transporting him to a more colorful reality. Thinking about it now, that is what Bombay Beach is to me.

Arna’s Children
This is a heartbreaking documentary directed by Juliano Mer Khamis and Danniel Danniel, about a children’s theater group in Jenin in the Palestinian territories operated by Arna Mer-Khamis, the director’s mother, an Israeli-Jewish political and human rights activist.
The film portrays the lives of Arna Mer-Khamis and the child members of the theater who, over the course of the movie, grow from little children into young men. Three of the theater children became terrorists and died in operations or while resisting the Israeli army, and one of them committed a suicide attack in 2001, murdering four civilians. The film won “Best Documentary Feature” 2004 Tribeca Film Festival and this year, the director of the film, Juliano Mer Khamis, was assassinated in Jenin on April 4th 2011 by masked militants.

The UP series from 7-49
“The Up” Series is a continuing documentary that has followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old. The children were selected to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain, with the explicit assumption that each child’s social class predetermines their future. Every seven years, the director, Michael Apted, films new material from as many of the fourteen as he can get to participate. I’ve watched this series in one long marathon. Next year, in May, “56 Up” will be out. If you’ve never seen the previous chapters, I recommend catching up on them before the new one comes out. Watching this series makes you see how ephemeral our youthful assumptions are and how hard it is to grow up and become the people we want to be. It is also a great study of the effect that a camera has on the lives of the people it’s recording.

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