The fourth annual Docu.Text festival opens at the National Library of Israel on August 19, featuring five days of award-winning documentary films related to creativity, art and identity, as well as conversations with prominent figures, music, exhibits of rare items from the National Library collections, special tours and more.
One of this year's most talked about documentary films "RBG" will be screened under the stars in the National Library plaza. The film, which tells the story of outspoken U.S. Supreme Court justice and cultural icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will be followed by a conversation with Israel's own legendary, trailblazing, female Supreme Court justice Dalia Dorner about her decades-long personal relationship with RBG.
Tormented by guilt for the part he played in creating propaganda that sent a million people to their graves, in "Stronger than a Bullet", Iranian photographer Saeid Sadeghi goes in search of the surviving subjects of his works of propaganda. Lyrically narrated by Sadeghi himself, his journey is a rare opportunity to see the surprising and hidden sides of Iran. The film will be followed by a conversation with renowned photographer and Israel Prize laureate Alex Levac about the question of whether any photograph is truly un-staged.
Avraham Sutskever was revered by many as the greatest Yiddish poet of all time. He saved the cultural treasures of the Vilna Ghetto before joining the partisans and then being picked up from the forests of Lithuania by a plane sent by the Soviet authorities. Some say Stalin himself ordered the rescue operation. The first plane sent crashed and its wings were made into a suitcase in which he stored his poems and other documents from the ghetto. He eventually came to Israel where he lived much of his life in obscurity. The suitcase is now at the National Library of Israel. Some of its treasures will be displayed alongside a screening of the new documentary film "Black Honey, The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutskever", to be followed by a conversation with the film's writer, Uri Barabash, and Sutskever's granddaughter, actress Hadas Kalderon.
A Saudi poet and the only woman to ever make it to the finals of Abu Dhabi’s TV hit “Million’s Poet” (75 million viewers!), Hissa Hilal wears a burka that covers even her eyes and makes her way to the stage by touch. Hilal, married and a mother of four, has been using a pseudonym, and never appeared on stage before. In her subversive, bold poetry, called by the host “a call for rebellion”, she criticizes the oppression of women and the aggression and religious extremism of the Arab world. In her eyes, she and all her countrywomen are living in a cage, and the ovations of the (exclusively male) audience empower her to break free. Her story is told in "The Poetess", which will be followed by a conversation with Dr. Iris Fruchter Ronen on "Poetry Slam, the Saudi Version - Subversive Feminist Poetry in the Arab World".
Just over a month following his passing, a special screening of "Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah", the first major documentary about the legendary filmmaker and the making of his seminal work "Shoah", will be followed by a discussion with Dr. Ofer Ashkenazi, director of the Richard Koebner Center for German History at the Hebrew University.
Docu.Text 2018 will close with an outdoor concert by legends of Israeli rock, Ehud Banai and the Refugees.
Docu.Text is a collaboration with the Docaviv festival and with the support of the New Fund for Cinema and Television and Carole and Saul Zabar. Special tours and exhibits will be held throughout the festival.
For more information and to purchase tickets, click here >>
Single indoor screening: ILS 20; Single outdoor screening: ILS 30; Closing event (screening and concert): ILS 65; Single tour ticket: ILS 20; Special: 6 screenings for the price of 5.
