Boxing, Addiction, Ryan O’Neil, Gorgeous Men & a Great Singles Night

By Ilana Angel
Published on September 16, 2011

Golan Takes Films to New Heights

By Amy Klein
Published on May 15, 2003

"Return from India" is one of the 18 new films, documentaries and TV dramas showing at the 19th Israel Film Festival, from May 28-June 8. Based on A.B. Yehoshua's best-selling book "Open Heart," "India," directed and co-produced by veteran filmmaker Menachem Golan, portrays a somewhat preposterous love story between the young Dr. Ben Rubin (Aki Avni) and the older Dori Lazar (Riki Gal) as they accompany her husband (Asi Dayan) to India to save their sick daughter. Golan was nominated for five Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film including "Entebbe: Operation Thunderbolt" (1977) and "Sallah Shabati" (1964); his film "The Assault" (1986) won the Oscar.

Love Amid Scuds

By Naomi Pfefferman
Published on November 8, 2001

Filmmaker Arik Kaplun saw babies everywhere when he moved back to Israel nine months after the Persian Gulf War. "It was a demographic explosion," says the Moscow-born director, who did the math and figured there'd been nooky in the sealed rooms. "I assumed that quite a lot of people had had that experience."

Lilly and Felice’s Tale

By Naomi Pfefferman
Published on August 10, 2000

All afternoon, a despairing Max Furberback paced his Berlin hotel room, drinking coffee and cognac. For three months the German TV writer-director had been holed up in the hotel, tackling the script of his debut feature film, "Aimée & Jaguar." Based on a 1994 book, the movie was to tell the true story of doomed lesbian love between Lilly Wust, a Nazi hausfrau, and Felice Schragenheim, a glamorous Jew-in-hiding in 1943 Berlin.

An American Love Story

By Naomi Pfefferman
Published on September 9, 1999

In 1990, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox met and fell in love with a black man, a bass player who performed in a blues band with one of her friends. "I had the naive sense that it was the '90s and that racism was on the decline," says Fox, 39, who grew up in a Jewish home and attended a multicultural Quaker grammar school in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia. "[So] I was genuinely shocked when the world of race in America just closed up around us."