Haifa Film Festival Discoveries: Sharon Amrani: Remember His Name

Another moving film unveiled at the Haifa Film Festival was the documentary entitled, Sharon Amrani: Remember His Name. Sharon Amrani was perhaps the most promising director from the Israeli Movie industry in the late 1990’s. Bonfire Night, his graduation film from the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem, won several awards, and his follow up, a 50 min. TV drama entitled Goodbye Cousin, picked up plenty of praise from both from critics and his colleagues alike. He even begun directing a TV series called Jerusalem Mix, but then disaster struck: the 31 year-old Amrani drowned.

“It’s like if I was dead before directing Late Marriage“, says Dover Kosashvili in the one hour documentary. Since the beginning of the millennium, Israeli films became the hit of the international film scene, but still, the unique voice of Amrani, torn between religious and secular worlds, is missing. Amrani’s story is brought to the screen by film critic and blogger-turned-director Yair Raveh, and he brought along talented filmmakers such as Dover Kosashvili (Late Marriage), Nir Bergman (Broken Wings, Intimate Grammar), and Joseph Cedar (Beaufort) to vividly remember the fallen filmmaker. In Sharon Amrani: Remember His Name, each director took on a scene that Sharon Amrani had wrote and left behind before his untimely death. Another co-director is Gili Gaon, who was Amrani’s wife at the time of the accident, recreates via the use of actors, the horrifying moments of Amrani’s death. Incorporating fictional and documentary material, Raveh manages to paint a loving picture of Israeli cinema, and explain that despite its richness and internationally renowned qualities, that this national cinema is still missing out on what would have been a unique, contributing voice.