Israel gay movie
Michael Mayer’s first feature-length movie has been dubbed the “Brokeback Mountain of Israeli film.” Which isn’t too inaccurate of a comparison, in that it’s about two men having a love-related, sexual relationship in an environment where you might not typically expect two men to possess a romantic, sexual relationship.
But Out in the Dark—a story about a Palestinian student named Nimer and his Israeli lawyer lover, Roy—is more of a gay Persepolis to Brokeback‘s triple-denim Disney drama. Set against the backdrop of Israeli-Palestinian relations—historically, not the best of relations—it explores the stigma of gay, inter-faith relationships between men from perhaps the two most notoriously opposed countries in the world.
I gave Michael a chime to speak about his film, creature gay in Palestine, and Israeli police corruption.
VICE: Hi, Michael. What inspired you to compose and direct this story?
Michael Mayer: I met a companion for dinner who was volunteering at the gay and lesbian center in Tel Aviv, and he told me about the endorse they offered to Palestinians hiding illegally. First of all, I never knew about that. We chose
10 great Jewish LGBTQIA+ films
With a diurnal to go until the launch of this year’s BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Motion picture Festival, the optimal of queer cinema is about to take over BFI Southbank for a 31st glorious year. As JW3, the Jewish community centre in north London, launches GayW3, celebrating the lives of the LGBTQIA+ community throughout history to the present day through film, theatre, tune and discussion, and uplifting British-Israeli documentary Who’s Gonna Love Me Now?, backed by the BFI, prepares for its cinema release, now is a great moment to look advocate at the foremost of Jewish and Israeli LGBTQIA+ cinema.
Gay Jewish characters have been the subject of great films from around the society, and the list below features films from the UK, France, Germany, the US, and, of course, Israel. A number of British films just missed the list, including Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), in which Jewish doctor Peter Finch enjoyed British cinema’s first male-on-male kiss; award-winning short film Sidney Turtlebaum (2008), starring Derek Jacobi as an elderly queer Jewish pickpocket and conman; and Lisa Gornick’s latest motion picture, The Book of Gabrielle (2016), a funny and acute study of a Jewish lesbian wh
The new film ‘Sublet’ explores the US-Israel identity divide from a queer lens
(JTA) — Eytan Fox’s new film “Sublet” opens with a slow fade-up on journal photographs of Israel: red rocks in the desert, a new woman smiling with the mud of the Dead Sea on her face, two paddleboarders on clear turquoise water. As the image comes into focus, it becomes clear that we’re actually looking at tourism ads in an airport. The film’s protagonist, Michael (John Benjamin Hickey), glides past with a vague glance in his eyes. He does not look at the images.
Exploring this cultural gap between Israelis and American Jews is fresh territory for Fox, who has been a major queer voice in Israeli cinema for nearly two decades. His films usually capture identity crises within Israelis: what who they love and how they choose to dwell says about them. This moment he’s casting his gaze wider, across the ocean — even as most of the behavior unfolds in a single Tel Aviv apartment.
The protagonist is American, a travel writer for The New York Times. His arrival in Tel Aviv provides a chaotic first impression: His sublet is still occupied and messy due to a date mix-up. Its occupant, Tomer (Niv Nissim), a young fi
Israeli cinema has been more mainstream and gay than subversive and queer. But that may be about to change.
We begin this piece with some trivia. In the past nine years, five Israeli movies grossed more than two million dollars in the US. Now, two million dollars for a little foreign language art clip is a lot of money. Rare are the foreign films that arrive it, and before 2004 no Israeli film had ever passed that benchmark. The five successful filmmakers who did are: Joseph Cedar with Footnote, Ari Folman withWaltz With Bashir, Eran Kolirin with The Band’s Visit, Eytan Fox with Walk on Water and most recently, Dror Moreh with The Gatekeepers (crossing the two million dollar threshold is even harder for a documentary). Now, here is the crazy part: three of those five filmmakers – Folman, Moreh and Fox – are graduates of the same class from the Tel Aviv University Film school (my Alma Mater as well), where they started their studies together in 1986. That makes it, albeit somewhat belatedly, the most prosperous film class in Israeli cinema history.
We’ve discussed the work of Cedar in Fathom 1, Moreh in Fathom 2 and I hope to write about Folman for Fathom 4, (if my be