The National Library of Israel’s DocuText festival will return to Jerusalem from August 16-20, bringing together new documentaries from Israel and abroad with a program that focuses on films using archival material from the library’s archives.
Now in its 11th year, the five-day festival will include dozens of screenings, Israeli premieres, meetings with filmmakers, workshops, special exhibits of archival material, and outdoor performances. This year’s theme is “Uncertainty,” reflecting the national mood amid international unrest.
The festival often opens and closes with music-themed films screened in the garden, and this year is no exception.
The official opening program will be the premiere of acclaimed documentary director Ran Tal’s The Sixteenth Sheep: The Reunion, about the return to the stage of one of the most beloved song projects in Israeli history, which turned into an unexpected success.
The Sixteenth Sheep is an album created 48 years ago through the collaboration of author/lyricist Yehonatan Geffen and musician/composer Yoni Rechter.
They set poems by Geffen about a child who can’t sleep to music, and the original album, an enduring classic that children today know as well as the adults who grew up with it, was performed and recorded by Rechter with Gidi Gov, Yehudit Ravitz, and David Broza.
At the height of the war, Rechter, Gov, Ravitz, and Broza came together for what was initially planned as a couple of performances, but it turned into a sensation that was extended to include many appearances.
DocuText will close on August 20 with Tomer Heymann’s 2003 documentary Aviv, a portrait of Aviv Geffen, Yehonatan Geffen’s son, which was made when the singer-songwriter marked a decade of extraordinary fame. Twenty-three years after the film’s release, the screening will be followed by a live outdoor performance by Geffen and his band, HaTa’uyot.
Several of the festival’s most intriguing events this year focus on writers and their archives.
Things Were Like That, directed by Adi Arbel, turns to the life and work of celebrated Israeli novelist Meir Shalev, who died in 2023. It tells much of his life story through his books, recordings, and personal archive. The August 19 screening will be accompanied by An Israeli Novel, a special display of items from Shalev’s archive at the library.
The library’s archives will also take center stage in connection with Life as a Rumor, the 2013 documentary by Adi Arbel and Moishe Goldberg, in which the late actor/director Assi Dayan recounts his turbulent life in his own distinctive voice.
Before the August 19 screening, the library will present Assi’s Drafts, a series of displays featuring selected items from Dayan’s archive.
Before the screening of LAISHA – The Story of a Women’s Magazine, Anna Somershaf’s documentary about the famous Israeli magazine, audiences can take part in the Can You Hear My Voice? tour, devoted to writings by women preserved in the National Library.
The tour will feature manuscripts, early editions, and other works that show how women gradually established a place in Hebrew and Jewish literary culture. The film itself examines the sometimes contradictory role Laisha has played in both reflecting and shaping the lives of Israeli women.
THE FESTIVAL features a few English-language works.
Gaylen Ross’s Sapiro v. Ford: The Jew Who Sued Henry Ford, screening on the festival’s opening day, tells the remarkable and surprisingly little-known story of Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish lawyer and organizer who took on automobile magnate Henry Ford over the antisemitic attacks published in Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.
Sapiro filed a libel suit against one of the richest and most influential men in America, turning their confrontation into a David-and-Goliath legal battle over antisemitism, propaganda, and the accountability of the powerful. Actor Ben Shenkman gives voice to Sapiro’s own words in the film.
Safe Room, directed by Haley Geffen, is another mostly English-language documentary centered on an Israeli story. It recounts how, during a single harrowing day on October 7, a doctor and his wife sheltered four families, creating an unexpected community in the midst of extraordinary danger.
The August 17 screening will be followed by a Q&A with Geffen and Tamar Schlesinger, one of the film’s participants.
In We Met at Grossinger’s, director Paula Eiselt looks back at the legendary Grossinger’s resort in New York’s Catskills, once the crown jewel of the “Borscht Belt.”
At a time when discrimination restricted where American Jews could vacation and socialize, Grossinger’s became both a refuge and a cultural institution, welcoming guests and performers from across American public life. The film uses the resort’s history to explore immigration, Jewish identity, belonging, and the longing for a place that can feel like home.
Another literary documentary, having its Israeli premiere, is Siri Hustvedt – Dance Around the Self, a portrait of the Norwegian-American novelist and essayist. The film traces Hustvedt’s journey from Minnesota to New York and examines her intellectual and personal partnership with the late novelist Paul Auster, who was a distant relative of Daniel Auster, Jerusalem’s first Jewish mayor.
The festival also includes The Campaign, directed by Kari Hollend and Cristina Bishai, an investigation of the battle over narratives about Israel, Gaza, and the Jewish people that has played out through social media and other media since October 7. The August 19 screening will be followed by a discussion in English with Hollend and Israeli digital advocates.
The documentary Shalom, directed by Meital Zvieli, is set in Jerusalem and approaches the impact of war from an unexpected angle. Its central character is Shalom, a rhinoceros at Jerusalem’s Biblical Zoo, whose caregivers include Rushdi, a Palestinian Muslim, and Gilad, an Israeli Jew.
Other highlights include Jane Elliott Against the World, about the American educator whose famous classroom exercise on prejudice made her a controversial figure in the struggle against racism; A Goodnight Kiss, a portrait of Holocaust survivor, literary scholar, and human-rights activist Irena Veisaite; Ivry Who?, about legendary Israeli violinist Ivry Gitlis; and The Orchestra, which takes viewers behind the scenes with the Orchestre de Paris and conductor Klaus Mäkelä.
This year’s DocuText features an especially interesting and diverse program this year.
For more information, go to the website atdocutext.nli.org.il/en
