The 17th EPOS International Art Film Festival, which presents dozens of films from Israel and abroad exploring art, literature, architecture, music, dance, theater, and photography, will take place between September 16 and September 19 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
This year, the festival will expand beyond Tel Aviv for the first time with EPOS in the Gilboa, a new program at the Mishkan Museum of Art at Ein Harod, created in cooperation with the Gilboa Regional Council.
Six festival films will be screened there from September 17-19, with each screening accompanied by a short lecture connected to the film’s subject.
The festival will open with Take the Money and Run, a documentary about Danish artist Jens Haaning and an incident that became one of the contemporary art world’s most provocative controversies.
A Copenhagen museum lent Haaning half a million kroner to create a work incorporating banknotes on two large canvases.
Instead, the museum received two empty frames and a work titled Take the Money and Run. The disappearance of the money sparked an international debate over whether Haaning had created a daring conceptual artwork or simply taken the museum’s cash.
The closing film, Naked Ambition, focuses on Bunny Yeager, a successful photographer for Playboy Magazine during the 1950s and 1960s. Decades later, Yeager was embraced by some feminist movements as an example of an independent woman who helped other women take pride in their bodies, and her photographs were exhibited in American museums.
A special tribute will also be held in memory of Israeli director Ram Loevy, featuring a screening of Bread, about a bakery worker who loses his livelihood after 20 years and begins a hunger strike. The film was among the early Israeli works to confront the economic distress of development towns.
Israeli films at the festival include Seven Tractates on the Life of Bruria, directed by Bruria Pasternak Sharvit, an autobiographical work about her life in the mainly haredi (ultra-Orthodox) city of Bnei Brak as an artist and mother of five.
Another is On Her Own, directed by Bracha Zisman-Cohen, which portrays artist Raida Adon and the idea that, wherever she lives, only art truly feels like home.
There is also Dalit Kimor’s Ida’s Dance Club, about a ballroom-dancing competition whose participants have long passed retirement age but continue to dance, sing, fall in love, and experience disappointment.
The festival will also include two competitions centered on Tel Aviv-Jaffa. The second annual Urban Diary competition, produced in cooperation with the Tel Aviv-Jaffa City Museum, will present short films that examine the city through cultural, personal, and social perspectives.
Then, the films will be screened at Tel Aviv-Jaffa City Museum and added to its collection of urban stories. A separate short-film competition will focus on artists and art in Israel, aiming to promote cinematic work about the country’s cultural life and help preserve it through film.
For younger viewers, EPOS will present Louisa, an award-winning production by Jerusalem’s Train Theater, created by Iris Domany. Recommended for children aged five and up, the performance follows a video and animation artist whose tiny collections gradually come to life through the lens of a magnifying camera, creating the world of Louisa, a girl searching for a sense of belonging.
Another program, Poetry Movies, curated by Yasmin Kaini, will include tributes to poets Israel Eliraz and Hedva Harechavi, as well as films dealing with war and artificial intelligence. The program will also feature the premiere of Taha: The Voice
Between the Lines, a short documentary about Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who died in 2010. His poetry, translated into dozens of languages, dealt less directly with the conflict than with pain, suffering, and hope.
The festival will pay tribute to Czech-born British playwright Tom Stoppard, with a documentary, Tom Stoppard: A Charmed Life, offering a rare look at his life and work, as well as a screening of the film adaptation of Anna Karenina, for which Stoppard wrote the screenplay.
Music documentaries will include films about Gustav Mahler’s years in New York; the extraordinary career of cellist
Jacqueline du Pré, who Yo-Yo Ma recalls married Daniel Barenboim, and who battled with illness; conductor Simon Rattle; and German conductor Joana Mallwitz.
Other films examine the lives and work of artists including Caravaggio, Egon Schiele, conceptual artist Mierle Laderman
Ukeles, architects Winy Maas and Soren Pihlmann, photographer Martin Schoeller, dancer and choreographer Germaine Acogny, and theater director Robert Wilson.
EPOS is under the artistic direction of Miki Laron, joined by artistic directors Yotam David Zitter and Shani Kiniso.
For more information, visit the festival website at https://filmart.co.il/en/home-english/
