Home In E Major, 56 min, 2019.
How do you know when you are home? Is it where you hang your hat? Or where you leave your heart?
Moving from Jerusalem to Durham, North Carolina, I went from being at home to living as a foreigner. Living in an utterly unfamiliar environment, I became keenly aware of the paradoxical forces that transform a house, a material foundation and a modular environment, into a home that embraces, nurtures and sustains those who live in it. My film documents this transformation.
We were four strangers under the same roof - the landlady Elisabeth, a 93 year-old firecracker from Austria and a retired linguist, and her three tenants: Li, a 27 year-old engineering scholar from China, Stuart, a 75 year-old retired American lawyer and myself, a 33 year-old filmmaker from Jerusalem. With time and often dramatic upheavals in the house together with budding friendships, the four of us came to support and care for one another. Home in E Major is a personal film, it documents a special meeting and a unique friendship.
Russian Face | 30 min, 2015.
Russian Face, Tamar Rachkovsky’s first film, is a poetic document about her mother, Vera Gutkina– a painter, a Russian immigrant in Israel, a divorcee and a mother of two. The film is a multi-layered dialogue between the two women: between mother and daughter, an established artist and a budding one, between difficult childhood memories and a fresh adult sensitivity, between a Russian face and an Israeli accent. Tamar, who as a child aspired to work in a supermarket, because “everything there is neat and simple,” now, an adult and an artist making her first steps, tries to come to terms with her lifelong dilemma: Can a woman be simultaneously successful in art and in motherhood?
Is Water The Opposite Of Fire? | 2 min, 2016.
On one of the hot August summer nights, I arrived at Teddy Fountain beneath the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem. Arabs, Jews, religious and secular children were dancing together joyfully. As if in a midsummer night dream, this ray of sunshine and hope shone brightly amid these tense and violent days.
Hannah | 1 min, 2018