Directed by Rafael Balulu
Produced by Yair Qedar
Documentary
Israel | 2019 | 50
In Hebrew, French, and English
with English subtitles
Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff was admired in life for her intelligence, beauty, and independence. Born in Cairo, she lived in Paris and New York, before spending her twilight years in Givatayim, Israel. Only now is her pioneering work as the first to express a Levantine Sephardi identity garnering the critical attention and respect she deserves. Award-winning Moroccan-Israeli Director Rafael Balulu returns to the NYSJFF (A SONG OF LOVES, 2016) with a film tracing Shohet Kahanoff’s intellectual journey through encounters with her elderly friends in Paris and leading intellectuals of the Greater Sephardi/Mizrahi discourse in Israel. What emerges is more than the portrait of an impressive thinker; Balulu also discovers the fate of Levantine identity in Israel today as a cultural option for pride and honor. This is the 14th film of the HEBREWS project, a creative lab for biographical documentaries about leading contributors to Hebrew and Jewish literature. Top-tier directors are invited to create films that combine biography, translation of texts to cinematic form, original music, original animation, and personal interpretation.
Rafael Balulu
Rafael Balulu was born in 1981 in Afula, Israel, to a family who emigrated from Morocco. Balulu, a 2010 graduate from the Sam Spiegel Film School, Jerusalem, Israel, now teaches film at Tel Aviv. He participated in the Berlinale Talent Campus (2008, 2011, and 2012). He also participated in the Toronto International Film Festival’s Talent Lab. Balulu has written and directed fifteen shorts, some of which won international prizes, including: SUCH EYES, which won the NYC Shorts Festival; BATMAN AT THE CHECKPOINT, which won the Berlin Today Award at the 62nd Berlinale; MY NAME IS SOLOMON HAGOS, which premiered at the 2013 TIFF; and CLOSE YOUR EYES, which premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival. SONG OF LOVES – R. DAVID BUZAGLO a feature documentary premiered at DocAviv and at the NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival. Balulu’s latest film is a documentary about Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff – the great Egyptian-Jewish intellectual, novelist, essayist, and journalist.