How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon

With the 1996 election campaign approaching, director Avi Mograbi set out to make a film about an infamous and admired political figure, former Israeli cabinet minister and legendary army general, Arik Sharon. To the filmmaker's surprise, he finds Sharon extremely likeable. In the course of the campaign, Mograbi sets aside his leftist political beliefs and gets surprisingly close to Sharon. This ironic fictitious documentary tells the story of the film's making, which turns into a domestic melodrama threaded with nightmares about Sharon and arguments with his wife. The real story is of the impossible close encounter between left and right in present-day Israel.

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.