Canadian Premiere
“Sometimes the most horrific things are aesthetic,” says Micha Bar-Am, one of Israel’s most important photojournalists. Warfare, atrocities, and the quotidian are hauntingly juxtaposed in his photo reels, chronicling over five decades of Israel’s history, alongside intimate snapshots of his own domestic life. Composed of stills and contact sheets selected from Bar-Am’s archive of over 500,000 masterful photos, 1341 Frames of Love and War provides a deep focus on the beauty and horror of humanity as captured through the photographer’s lens.
Through recorded conversations, Bar-Am and Orna, his wife and archivist, reflect on the archive’s most impactful and troubling photos. Now 91 years old, Bar-Am is left to ponder how the photographic image supersedes memory, and how, tragically, “no photograph would avert the next war.” Director Ran Tal’s sobering, intelligent, and skillfully edited film unveils the steep personal cost of documenting and bearing witness to brutality.
Best Director and Best Editor Awards, Docaviv 2022
Q&A Oct 8 & 9
Media Partner
Micha Bar-Am
Israel/UK/USA
2022
In Hebrew and German with English subtitles
Graphic Violence
Book Tickets
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Lives of Others
This month's Talking Pictures film is a masterly Cold War thriller set in East Berlin. An agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives...
Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other
This intimate and candid film by a younger husband and wife artist team is a delicate and immensely moving dual portrait of two artists, husband and wife, together and apart, at that point in life when the end casts a shadow over even the sunniest day.
Image: © Manon et Jacob and Final Cut For Real
Blue Road - The Edna O'Brien Story
Judging by this candid, funny, passionate biographical documentary, it would have been a wild ride to have been Irish novelist Edna O'Brien, or even to have been in her circle of friends and lovers. Well, for an hour and a half we can pretend we were.
Credits
Executive Producer
Yael Melamede, Nancy Pomagrin, Guy Lavie, Keren Gleicher, Danna Stern
Producer
Ran Tal, Sarig Peker
Screenwriter
Ran Tal
Editor
Nili Feller
Director
Photo by Uriel Sinai
Ran Tal
Ran Tal, born in 1963, graduated from the Tel Aviv University’s Department of Film in 1994. He directs diverse television projects and is the editor of Takriv, an online magazine for discussion and critique of documentary film. Tal is the recipient of the Ophir Prize, the Jerusalem Film Festival Volgin Award, several awards at the DocAviv Film Festival, among others. Tal teaches cinema in the Film Departments at Sapir College and Tel Aviv University.
Filmography: Skin Deep (1996); Children of the Sun (2007); The Garden of Eden (2012); The Museum (2017)