Avraham Heffner

10 years after he left Israel and "played it big-time in America", Benny Shpitz returns for a visit, self-exploring his youth, friends, dreams, beliefs and idol, Daniel Wax, who symbolized the "beautiful Israeli". Shpitz finds out his friends are melancholic, unsatisfied with marriage life, hiding a vast hole in their sole. In a wider context, Israel post 67' will no longer be the society that it was meant to be.

Fifty years after Slow Down by Avraham Heffner won a prize at Venice Film Festival, top alumni of the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School challenge the 1968 legendary black and white

An Israeli drama

In December 1987, the (first) Palestinian Intifada broke out and the Occupied Territories were set alight with a mass wave of demonstrations, protesting the ongoing Israeli occupation – the largest scale, longest-running ones seen in the area since 1967. The IDF was sent in to quash the uprising and before long, TV screens across the country were inundated with footage of burning tyres, stones thrown about, and baton-wielding Israeli soldiers chasing after teens and children. In the face of this new reality that made the question of the Occupied Territories the single most pressing issue of the time, the Jerusalem Film Festival went ahead and commissioned the following project. The result is a classic, Heffner-esque film – an intelligent labyrinth containing the most fundamental of Israeli tropes: The Holocaust; Arabs; us vs. them – all of which find themselves clashing and intermingling, and ultimately rendering the viewers helpless and cringing with awkwardness.

The movie, set in the Israeli 1969 War of Attrition, tells the story of a prestigious military band, and the tensions and ego crises new band members cause when joining the band. Will the band survive?

Israeli soldiers cross the border into hostile Arab territory to kidnap an enemy terrorist. After the man is captured, the Israeli unit receives warning of an enemy counter attack, and the unit is forced to trek through the desert on foot.

In the Southwest of 1915 Carlos backs an intended uprising of the common countymen against his father Phillip, a despotic landowner who exploits the rural poors in his silver mines. But Carlos' indecision and his love for his young and beautiful stepmother leads into a failure.

At the start of the 1967 Six-Day War (June 5-10) between Israel and the surrounding Arab nations, a team of eight Israeli commandos, with their female boat captain in tow, are sent on a suicide mission deep into the Sinai to destroy an important Arab radar station at Sharm El Sheikh to pave way for the main invading Israeli forces.