The People Behind the Films

by Ara Rubyan | Sep 30, 2008

Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story

Directors:

Ari Daniel Pinchot

Ari’s first credit came as the Associate Producer of the runaway hit documentary, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. The documentary was one of the top ten all-time grossing theatrical documentaries.

Following that film came the award winning feature documentary, Paper Clips, distributed by Miramax Films. The film won several Audience and Best Documentary Awards including the Best Documentary at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival.

Ari was also Co-Producer of Everything Must Go, starring Will Ferrell and Rebecca Hall, distributed by Lionsgate Films in 2011. He was also Co-Executive Producer of The Ides of March (5 2012 Golden Globes Nominations) directed by and starring George Clooney.

Jonathan Gruber

Jonathan has been directing award-winning documentary films, commercials, and videos for more than 20 years. He loves creating evocative images and telling nuanced stories, whether for a 30-second advertisement or a two-hour feature. Projects that Jonathan directed and produced have screened at festivals and in theaters nationwide and around the world, and have aired on PBS, The History Channel, National Geographic, Discovery Networks, and more.

Jewish Soldiers in Blue & Gray, another film that he directed, wrote, and produced, screened at the 2012 Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival and is currently airing on PBS stations nationally.

Torn

Director: Ronit Kertsner

Kertsner is an award-winning documentary filmmaker – director, producer and editor. Born in Jerusalem in 1956, married with two daughters, Ronit lives in Tel Aviv Israel. After her military service she was admitted to the Cinema Department at Tel Aviv University where she embarked on a four-year course of study. Upon completion Ronit began working as a professional editor of documentaries and features for TV and other media.

Ronit has edited dozens of documentary films over the years. For the last 10 years Ronit has directed and produced 4 documentaries: The Secret (Berlin Film Festival 2002, first prize at the International Film Festival in Bordeaux 2003); I, The Aforementioned Infant (Haifa film Festival 2006); Menachem and Fred (Cinema For Peace Award, Berlin 2009); and most recently, Torn (Docaviv International Film Festival).

Hava Nagila (The Movie)

Director: Roberta Grossman

An award-winning filmmaker with a passion for history and social justice, Roberta Grossman has written and produced more than forty hours of documentary television. She was the series producer and co-writer of 500 Nations, the eight-hour CBS mini-series on Native Americans hosted by Kevin Costner. Grossman’s feature documentary, Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action, premiered in February 2005, and has screened and won awards at more than forty festivals worldwide. It aired on public television stations in November 2005.

Other writing and producing credits include In the Footsteps of Jesus, a four-hour special for the History Channel; Hollywood & Power: Women on Top, a special for AMC; The Rich in America: 150 Years of Town and Country Magazine for A&E; The History of Christianity: The First Thousand Years, a four-hour special on A&E; Medal of Honor, a six-part television series produced for U.S. News & World Report; Heroines of the Hebrew Bible and Judas for the A&E series Mysteries of the Bible; and Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh.

Foreign Letters

Director: Ela Thier

Ela Thier’s credits include The Wedding Cow (writer), garnering eighteen international awards, including four Best-Feature and four Audience-Choice awards; Foreign Letters (writer-director); and Puncture (story), a film starring Chris Evans. Ela has written, directed, and produced over a dozen short films, including A Summer Rain, which won four Best-Short awards and screened at more than 150 venues and festivals.

A prolific writer, Ela’s feature scripts have been selected four times by the Independent Film Week (formerly IFP Market). Among numerous recognitions, Ela was awarded a fellowship grant in screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2008), and was nominated for the White House Project Emerging Artist Award (2010).

Ela independently teaches screenwriting and film directing in New York City.

Footnote

Director: Joseph Cedar

Cedar was born in New York. When he was 6 his family moved to Israel, and he grew up in the Bayit VeGan neighborhood in Jerusalem. He studied in a Yeshiva High School.

In the Israeli army he served as a paratrooper. After graduating in Philosophy and History of theatre from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he studied cinema studies in the New York University. When he came back to Israel he started working on the screenplay for his debut film, Time of Favor (2000), for which he moved and lived for 2 years in the Israeli settlement Dolev. The film became a big success and won 6 Ofir Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

His second film was Campfire (2004) who was also a success with 5 Ofir Academy Awards including Best Picture, with 2 of them, Best Director and Best Screenplay, going to Cedar. For Beaufort (2007), his third film, he received the Silver Bear award for Best Director in the Berlin International Film Festival. Beaufort became one of the most critically acclaimed and successful Israeli films of the decade and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, the first such nomination for an Israeli film in 24 years. It also received 4 Ofir Academy Awards and was based on Cedar’s own experiences during his army service on Israel’s border with Lebanon. It was shown at the 2012 Baton Rouge Film Festival.

Cedar is an Orthodox Jew. His films are known to touch delicate issues of Israeli society. Israeli critic Yair Rave wrote:

One of the reasons I like Cedar’s films so much is… his ability to merge the Israeli spirit… with the universal cinematic codes.

His film Footnote premiered In Competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. The film was named as one of the five nominees for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012.