The Belle from Gaza

It's a question that surprises most people: “Would you have sex with an Arab?” Film-maker Yolande Zauberman doesn't just ask anyone this question, she asks people in the clubs and bars and streets of Tel Aviv. 20% of Israelis are of Arab origin, but for some the question is still incomprehensible, for others long since reality and yet others a political issue. One thing it is never is immaterial. The film manages to break down the Middle East conflict into individuals and to show what enormous influence it has, even into the most intimate of spheres.

Filmed clandestinely, Zauberman’s extraordinary documentary exposes South Africa’s insidious apartheid policy of “race classification” by focusing on the love affair of Robert and Doris, and unresolvable, moral fissure with Robert’s children and the country. Winner of the Paris Film Festival Grand Prize.

In 1930s Poland Christian boy Ivan goes to live with a Jewish family to learn a trade. He becomes friends with Abraham, the son of the family. However, anti-Semitism is rife in their environment, and they flee to escape an upcoming conflict. Journeying together, they demonstrate their inseparability.

Menahem Lang, an actor with an extraordinary singing voice, returns to Bnei Brak, the city in Israel where he grew up and a center of ultra-orthodox Judaism. Now in his 30s, Lang left the city at 20, following years of rape and sexual abuse by elder, devout family men in the community. Yet, Lang was far from being an isolated case: his conversations with other abused young men document a cycle of sexual predators and tormented lives.

A young woman visiting Paris misses the last bus home and finds herself stranded on the outskirts of Paris. Entering a local club, she meets a troubled drug addict.

In Paris, in 1943, Jules, a 19-year-old Jew, lived without an ideal, tossed about by circumstances. He becomes in turn a traitor then a hero. Thomas, his fifteen-year-old brother, wants to act and fight in resistance.