Best international art movies to be featured in the Epos film festival

• Published date: 17 April 2024
• Author: HANNAH BROWN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The opening event will be a screening of Saskia Boddeke's Inside My Heart, which follows a theater company that integrates performers with disabilities and chronicles the actors' rehearsal process for a play they are staging. The camera catches the fears, conflicts, and moments of encouragement and love that they share

An Israeli film about performers with disabilities, The Power of Balance by Amit Mann and Tom Barka'i, looks at four dancers in wheelchairs who join the Vertigo dance troupe for an integrated modern dance performance.

Elwira Niewiwea and Piotr Rosolowski's The Hamlet Syndrome is about a group of actors in war-torn Ukraine staging a play that is partly a production of Hamlet and partly the story of their lives.

Bill Evans: Time Remembered by Bruce Spiegel is a look at the life and work of the jazz music genius. It looks back at how Evans arrived in New York and slowly made a name for himself within its jazz scene, eventually being hired by Miles Davis, with whom he performed on the best-selling masterpiece Kind of Blue.

Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken's Munch tells the story of the life of the great Norwegian painter, best known for his painting, The Scream, but it isn't a conventional biopic. Four different actors (including a woman) portray Munch during different periods in his life, and not in chronological order. These include his time in Berlin where his art was rejected; his final days under Nazi occupation of Norway; his youth and first loves; and his alcohol addiction and psychological crises. Each part is written by a different screenwriter and depicts part of Munch's multifaceted personality.

TWO FILMS look at the work of major Israeli painters, Portrait of an Artist – Moshe Castel, about an artist known for his kabbala-inspired works, directed by Yona Zaretsky, and Portrait of an Artist – Yehezkel Streichman, directed by Jachin Hirsh, about an artist and teacher who began painting watercolors late in life.

DEPOT – Reflecting Boijmans is a documentary by Sonia Herman Dolz about the creation of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, which stores 150,000 works of art and is open to the public as a museum. Inaugurated in 2021, the structure looks like a shiny silver teacup from the outside, and it has garnered objections and criticism as well as praise.

Festival's literary section

In the literature section, Eli Gorn's Burning Off the Page examines the sensual work of Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin. The words she penned a century ago...