MELBOURNE Wednesday 24 September 2008 – The 19th annual Festival of Jewish Cinema will showcase the best of Jewish cinema, including 16 Australian premieres, from 5-23 November, 2008 at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image and from 6-23 November, 2008 at Sydney’s GU Bondi Junction Cinemas.
Festival highlights include two films by of world renowned filmmaker Amos Gitai; One Day You’ll Understand and Disengagement. Disengagement is a powerful drama starring Juliette Binoche as Ana, a French woman who, after the death of her father, is compelled to return to Israel to search for the child she gave up twenty years earlier. Eventually arriving in Israel with her brother Uli during the period of the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Ana comes face to face with the county’s present reality as she struggles to re-engage with her own personal history. One Day You’ll Understand, Gitai’s newest film, follows the story of Victor, a successful Parisian businessman, who is spurred on by current events, to try to put together the missing pieces of his family history by travelling to a French village where his grandparents and mother used to live, in the hope of finding some answers.
