Aice Israeli Film Festival

The Sunday Age

Sunday August 31, 2008

Tom Ryan

AICE ISRAELI FILM FESTIVAL

At the Como and Brighton Bay cinemas from tomorrow until September 7

Under the canny guidance of the estimable Katriel Schory, executive director of the Israel Film Fund since 1999, Israeli cinema has taken a major leap forward in the past few years. And even if it's not exactly the latest "trend du jour" that Schory claims it to be, yet (at least as far as local exhibitors are concerned), The Band's Visit and the extraordinary Waltz with Bashir (pictured, and due for release next month) provide clear indications that things are on the move. The impressive sample on offer at the fifth festival to take place under the banner of the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange further illustrates the point. Tzahi Grad's Foul Gesture (2006, 98 minutes) is a gripping thriller about a man propelled into an escalating crisis after his car is damaged in a road-rage incident. Given the runaround by an unsympathetic bureaucracy - the police, the insurance company - he takes matters into his own hands. There's a telling irony in the fact that, at the same time as he's at his most vulnerable, he also discovers a new lease of life. Gal Zaid, the film's lead actor, co-writer and co-producer, is a festival guest. Equally impressive is writer-director Mushon Salmona's feature debut, Vasermil (2007, 98 minutes). It's a gritty drama about three youths growing up in the desert city of Be'er Sheva in southern Israel, suffocated by disaffection, and constrained by an oppressive male culture. Cutting back and forth between the present and the past, director and co-writer Assaf Bernstein's suspenseful The Debt (2007, 96 minutes) finds a former Mossad agent travelling to the Ukraine to clean up the mess that she and two fellow agents left behind in 1964 when they were sent to arrest "the surgeon of Birkenau". An American remake is already in the works.