Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi

Israeli gadfly Avi Mograbi (HOW I LEARNED TO OVERCOME MY FEAR AND LOVE ARIK SHARON, 1996) is back with a politically dense, tongue-in-cheek mock documentary. It is 1998 and Israel is turning fifty. Mograbi is hired by Israeli television to document numerous lavish celebrations of the nation’s anniversary. At the same time, a veteran Palestinian television producer, Daoud Kutaub, hires him to document a wave of evictions of Palestinians. Meanwhile, Mograbi is facing the prospect of losing his own home. The filmmaker obsessively turns the camera on himself as he desperately tries to make sense of his entangled life. Mograbi masterfully blurs the lines between fact and fiction, between the personal and the political. A metaphor for modern Israeli life.
For the past 18 years, Filmmaker Avi Mograbi has been working in the local Israeli feature and commercial film industry as Assistant Director, Script Writer, Production Manager, and Director. Born in 1956, he studied Art at Ramat Hasharon Art School and Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He has worked with local and international directors among them: Claude Lelouche, Moshe Mizrahi, Eitan Green, Daniel Vaxman, Renen Shor, Shahar Segal, and Serge Lalou. FILMOGRAPHY Relief, 1999, video installation, 5 minutes in a loop. How I learned to overcome my fear and love Arik Sharon, 1997, video, 61 minutes, documentary. The reconstruction, (The Danny Katz murder case) 1994, video, 50 minutes, documentary. Deportation, 1989, 16mm, 12 minutes.
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w/English Subtitle
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77