Yair Lev
Yair Lev (born 1959, in Tel Aviv) is a documentary filmmaker, professor and senior lecturer in the screen-based Arts Department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Israel, and a lecturer at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School. He is the recipient of the Israeli Minister of Education and Culture Prize for Cinematic Arts (1996) and of the Ministry of Education and Sport Cinema Award (2018). Biography and early career. Lev is a graduate of The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television in Tel Aviv University (1987). As a student he created the  short documentary "The Making of Absolute Beginners", that documented the making of "Absolute Beginners" (directed by Julian Temple and starring David Bowie), filmed at Shepperton Studios, Surrey. After returning to Israel, he directed his diploma film, a short fiction film "Holes in the Hands" (1987), that was featured in the Munich Film Festival for Short Films, Prague Festival and the Badalona Film Festival. Film making career. Lev gained public recognition with his first feature film "Hugo": one of the earliest films to baldly and directly confront The Holocaust experience from a "second generation survivors" perspective. In the film, survivor Hugo  Lev recounts the extraordinary, black humour filled tale of his Holocaust survival on a backdrop of the convoluted relationship he has with his son, the director. The film triggered public reverberations and was selected for the "Forum" at Berlin International Film Festival, Chicago, Montreal and the Jerusalem Film Festival. His next film "Yakantalisa – a Portrait of a Dead Poet" (1996), a portrait of poet Hezi Leskali was nominated for the Wolgin Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival. That same Year Lev won the "Minster for Education and Culture Prize for Cinema". His next film "Uri Avnery: Warrior for Peace" (2002 ) won the "In the Spirit of Freedom" award for best documentary at the 2002 Jerusalem Film Festival. The film paints a portrait of Uri Avnery- a peace activist, radical leftist, prominent journalist and former member of parliament. The film featured in a number of international festivals (among them Munich, New-York, Miami, FIFA-Biarritz, Osnabrück, Vienna Jewish Film Festival, Israeli-Palestinian Film Festival Paris), was nominated for the Ophir Award (Israeli Academy Award) and was in wide release in cinemas in Israel and Germany. In 2008 he completed "Hugo 2" produced by David Deri; a sequel to "Hugo". The film  that was shot over the course of four years with the director himself serving as cinematographer, differs from the first in putting the complex relationship between the director and his father under the spotlight and examining the future of Holocaust remembrance in a world devoid of Holocaust survivors. The film was part of the Wolgin Competition during the Jerusalem Film Festival 2008, and was screened commercially at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and Tel-Aviv Cinematheque. In 2017 he co-directed with Etty Wieseltier on "The Longings of Maya Gordon", a poetic portrait of a Polish-Israeli artist- a perennial outsider in  her life and works. The film participated in the Docaviv festival that year and in the ART festival around Poland. His next film "You Only Die Twice" (2018), co-created with David Deri who was producer, director of photography and co-writer, won both critical acclaim and box-office success. The film is a documentary thriller, in which Lev, as a detective, sets out to expose the identity of the unknown thief who assumed the identity of his grandfather during the second World War. The film, an Austrian-Israeli co-production in association with NGF, participated in more than 40  international festivals (among them Docaviv, Thessaloniki, Diagonale-Austria, Chagrin Falls – Ohio, Kraków) and won various prizes. The film was also nominated for the Ophir Award (The Israeli Academy Award). The film had a general release in Israel that lasted nearly a year and attracted tens of thousands of viewers as well as being one of the ten highest-grossing films of the decade at the Tel-Aviv Cinematheque. Lecturer and film-activist career. Lev is a Professor and senior lecturer at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School (where he has taught since 1993) and at the Bezalel Academy of  Arts and Design (since 1999). In the years 2003-2008 he led workshops on directing documentary films at ESCAC (the Cinema and Audio-visual School of Catalonia), Ludwigsburg, Cologne and in Warsaw. In the years 2000-2008 Lev edited and moderated at the Tel-Aviv Cinematheque for the Israeli Documentary Filmmakers Forum (as part of his activities as its board at the time) a monthly screening, debating and meeting fellow international filmmakers named  “Culture Club”. Amongst the filmed that were shown in "Culture Club" are Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line", Péter Forgács's "The Maelstorm", Alan Berliner's  Nobody's Business, "Svyato" and "once there were Seven Simeonis" by Viktor Kossakovsky and Herz Frank respectively, who were amongst the guests in these events. In the years 2008-2018 Lev served as Head of Studies for the “Greenhouse Program”- a program nurturing young documentary filmmakers from the MENA region. Notable films developed at the Greenhouse program include the Oscar nominated 5 Broken Cameras, directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, A Film unfinished, directed by Yael Hersonski, and “In Her Footsteps" directed by Rana Abu Fraiha. In 2017 Lev was promoted to senior lecturer in the Screen-based Arts  Department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Over the years Lev directed educational and instructional films and news reports, among others for "Uvda" (Israeli investigative and current affairs program), the Israeli Film Service and others. Lev also engaged in writing about documentary cinema for various journals in Israel and Europe. Style of filmmaking. In his films Lev constructs human profiles that analyse social and political dynamics. He also examines the standing and position of the documentary filmmaker in relation to the filmed reality, and the nature of reconstruction and testimony in documentary filmmaking. In his first Documentary "Hugo", Lev  already positioned himself as a witness; to the testimony delivered by his father the Holocaust survivor, of his experience in the camps, and his survival. The film was ground-breaking in its portrayal of the dynamic between the second-generation survivor and his parents, in this case the survivor father, and in the way it used humour as a cinematic tool and a human theme in the context of the Holocaust. In the film Lev contemplates about the significance of bearing witness to his own father's story and his moral duty as a documenting son placing a camera in  front of his father and other family members. Accentuating the presence of the film crew and himself within the film raises the aesthetic and ethical awareness to the issue. This awareness becomes yet more present and apparent in the sequel "Hugo2", that followed nearly twenty years later. In that film Lev revisits his father, now old and sick, and in a non-sentimental manner expands on the family dynamic of his own family under the shadow of Holocaust memories and the fear of their pending loss. In his next films, "Yakantalisa – a Portrait of a Dead Poet" and "Uri Avnery : Warrior for Peace", his choice to focus on those whose poetry and politics, Hezy Leskly and Uri Avneri respectively, shape a sober, critical look at Israeli society, becomes apparent. His films never focus on the mainstream, but on the controversial- artistically or politically- creating or maintaining controversy as an ideological stance. This aspect is also clear in his film "The Longings of Maya Gordon", whose protagonist inhabits a surrealist world of childhood memories and a sense of absence that can't be laid to rest. Lev's films deal with the essence of Israeli identity, its torn antagonistic parts, using  them in an attempt to define the act of documentation as well. This aspect comes to the fore in his latest film, "You Only Die Twice", in which Lev's own identity, as a documentary filmmaker, keeps transgressing the thin line between a fictional and a real-world character, in an attempt to follow the trail of the imposter who stole his grandfather's identity during the World War II. The Holocaust re-surfaces in this film, as in earlier ones, as part of an obsessive search of the documenting filmmaker, for his own self-identity and the family history  during the war years.