The Cinema of Uri Zohar

Charismatic Actor and filmmaker, icon of the Israeli bohemia, Uri Zohar provokes a real shock in Israeli secular society when he

decides to become religious in the end of the 1970th. Since he became an orthodox Rabbi, he rejects his cinema career that he sees

as part of a very dark past. But his films, which are still very poplars - some of them became a classics of Israeli cinema -, are the

reflection of an exceptional talent and sensibility, and stand as a tragicomic mirror of the Israeli society of his time. This seminar

will examine Zohar’s career up from the sixties, a period during which he was part of the “New Sensibility”, the Israeli modernist

cinema movement, up to the end of the seventies, when his cinema took a very personnel and autobiographical turn. We will

analyze the economical, esthetical al and ideological aspects of his films and try to measure his contribution to the history of

Israeli cinema, as well as his influence on Israeli contemporary filmmaker