Nurith Aviv

An unpredictable documentary from a fascinating storyteller, Agnès Varda’s last film sheds light on her experience as a director, bringing a personal insight to what she calls "cine-writing," traveling from Rue Daguerre in Paris to Los Angeles and Beijing.

For the first time, filmmaker Nurith Aviv sits down in front of the camera. As the defenders fall out, her unique life story as the first woman cinematographer in Europe turns out to be the key to her own films.

Circumcision is not a trivial act. For those parents, mostly "mixed" couples from different religious origins, a choice has to be made before the birth of their children, whether religion has a role in their lives or not.

The film is about portraying while being portrayed. Painter Liliane Klapisch sketches a portrait of Aviv in a sketchbook while Aviv films. Klapisch occasionally interrupts her work to look for a piece of chalk or a pencil – she checks, considers, and continues. Aviv's camera view alternates between the hands as they draw and the painter's scrutinizing gaze. The ways in which the two portraitists approach the world become visible during the gradual creation of the portraits, both drawn and filmed. An artistic encounter between two women, focused and attentive.

The film Announcements paints the portraits of seven women reflecting on the same theme. Their starting point is the announcement to Hagar, Sarah and Mary as in the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran. Their thoughts spread out and weave a new web, drawing strands from their associations and interpretations of these texts. And by talking about their own history, their personal myths, they work up to subjects such as the birth of image in the Christian world or that of poetry in ancient Greece. Announcements is a film about the movement of thought, the power of words, the secret of the voice, and the seduction of the image.

The film Announcements paints the portraits of seven women reflecting on the same theme. Their starting point is the announcement to Hagar, Sarah and Mary as in the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran. Their thoughts spread out and weave a new web, drawing strands from their associations and interpretations of these texts. And by talking about their own history, their personal myths, they work up to subjects such as the birth of image in the Christian world or that of poetry in ancient Greece. Announcements is a film about the movement of thought, the power of words, the secret of the voice, and the seduction of the image.

A documentary about brain, his capacities and his poetical aspect using testimonials from researchers around the world.

A documentary about brain, his capacities and his poetical aspect using testimonials from researchers around the world.

Seven young people tell their personal stories with the Yiddish language while discussing the life and work of avant-garde Yiddish poets.

The film Wandering Letter hangs by a thread: the tiny thread of a single letter of the alphabet, the letter R and its many pronunciations. Through the childhood memories of six people with different mother tongues (Norwegian, Japanese, Russian, Persian, Arabic and Creole), a whole world unfolds, from the intimate to the political. The film raises questions about life and death, filiation, migration, exile, resistance, and gender.

The film Wandering Letter hangs by a thread: the tiny thread of a single letter of the alphabet, the letter R and its many pronunciations. Through the childhood memories of six people with different mother tongues (Norwegian, Japanese, Russian, Persian, Arabic and Creole), a whole world unfolds, from the intimate to the political. The film raises questions about life and death, filiation, migration, exile, resistance, and gender.

Foreign labour, a phenomenon typical of the 1990s, is examined here in one village in the Jordan valley. Until the intifada, Palestinians from a nearby village worked the fields, but after one of the community’s members was murdered, the farmers decided to employ Thais. This documentary addresses the question of cheap labour, set against the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Starting from Sigmund Freud's definition of mourning and from Hannah Arendt's observation of the behavior of German intellectuals in 1933, Nurith Aviv lets her friends in Germany speak about what, according to them, has been irrevocably lost. In the background, a travelling shot of thirty minutes, a trip with the S-Bahn through Berlin, hometown of her Jewish ancestors.

Circumcision is not a trivial act. For those parents, mostly "mixed" couples from different religious origins, a choice has to be made before the birth of their children, whether religion has a role in their lives or not.

No synopsis available yet.

By taking an interest in sign languages, Nurith Aviv invites us to expand our perception of the human langage. Three generations of deaf and hearing persons, as well as researchers from a specialised laboratory from the university of Haifa make us discover the languages, complex and diverse, that exist today in Israel.

For centuries, Hebrew was a sacred language, a written language of prayer and scripture. But today it is also the language of everyday life in Israel. Nurith Aviv, Israeli writers, musicians, actors and a Rabbi/philosopher from varying countries and ethnic backgrounds discuss the relationship between their mother tongues and Hebrew. Featuring: Aharon Appelfeld, acclaimed for his literary explorations of the Holocaust; actress Jenya (Evgenya) Dodina; Rabbi and philosopher Daniel Epstein; poet Salma-n Musa-lahah; poet and translator Agi Mishol; singer Amal Murkus; poet and Professor of Jewish Thought Haviva Pedaya; and Meir Wieseltier, a member of the early Sixties "Tel Aviv Poets" group.

Flowers as a gift for guests, the Latin alphabet as a form of order. A film of rules which varies, multiplies and expands into a novel of nomadic world knowledge as it narrates. Nurith Aviv visits her friends and asks for their first names – c'est ça!

The story of Ivory Coast artist, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, who created four hundred pictograms, based on one-syllable words in his language, Bété, to help people in the Bété community learn to read more quickly.

The film, the second in a trilogy, containing "Misafa Lesafa" (2004) and "Traduire" (2011), deals with what became of Hebrew, the sacred language of the Jews for two millennia, that became a living language on the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The film continues the reflection begun in the director's previous film, Misafa Lesafa (2004), which films writers and artists recounting the conflicting relationship that they themselves experienced between their parents' language and the Hebrew language.

Six people recall the languages that cradled their childhoods: Judeo-Spanish or Judeo Arabic, or Judeo-Persian. Today, the languages themselves are dying but they left traces that still work on those who heard them as children.

The film is about portraying while being portrayed. Painter Liliane Klapisch sketches a portrait of Aviv in a sketchbook while Aviv films. Klapisch occasionally interrupts her work to look for a piece of chalk or a pencil – she checks, considers, and continues. Aviv's camera view alternates between the hands as they draw and the painter's scrutinizing gaze. The ways in which the two portraitists approach the world become visible during the gradual creation of the portraits, both drawn and filmed. An artistic encounter between two women, focused and attentive.

The film is about portraying while being portrayed. Painter Liliane Klapisch sketches a portrait of Aviv in a sketchbook while Aviv films. Klapisch occasionally interrupts her work to look for a piece of chalk or a pencil – she checks, considers, and continues. Aviv's camera view alternates between the hands as they draw and the painter's scrutinizing gaze. The ways in which the two portraitists approach the world become visible during the gradual creation of the portraits, both drawn and filmed. An artistic encounter between two women, focused and attentive.

The film is about portraying while being portrayed. Painter Liliane Klapisch sketches a portrait of Aviv in a sketchbook while Aviv films. Klapisch occasionally interrupts her work to look for a piece of chalk or a pencil – she checks, considers, and continues. Aviv's camera view alternates between the hands as they draw and the painter's scrutinizing gaze. The ways in which the two portraitists approach the world become visible during the gradual creation of the portraits, both drawn and filmed. An artistic encounter between two women, focused and attentive.

No synopsis available yet.