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The Rabbi’s 12 Children by Yael Bitton. Switzerland, 2007, 95 min, BetaSP, U.S. Premiere
Deeply personal and provocative, yet refreshingly undidactic, this documentary chronicles the Bittons, a Moroccan Jewish family that immigrated to Israel in the late 1950s, following the current of Zionism and facing a future of Arab rule after Moroccan independence. The family is in fact the filmmaker’s own, and rather than couch her project in distant politics, she enters her interviews with her father (who lives in Switzerland) and his 11 siblings (who are spread across the United States and Israel) openly, as part of a quest to understand the sense of dislocation she felt in her house while growing up. What emerges from this family portrait is a rarely seen representation of the complexities and diversity of the Jewish diaspora, not in opposition to others but rather observed from within.
Preceded by: Print 1 (Empreinte 1), by Nadim Asfar. Lebanon, 2007, 15 min, Digibeta
Tue, Nov 13, 4:30 P.M.
This screening is sponsored by:
Filmmaker's Biography
Yaël Bitton is an independent filmmaker and editor based in New York and Paris. She is a 1995 graduate of the Belgium National Film School in Brussels (INSAS). In 2002, she directed and produced Not for Sale, a chronicle of the life on East 7th Street in New York City and the gentrification of the East Village. The film was broadcast on New York PBS, RFO in France and Canal 22 in Mexico; Cinema Guild in NYC distributes it. Over the last ten years, she also directed a few other short documentaries: Live Free or Die (2004), Sept 11 (2001), Pazam (1995) and J’attends de vos nouvelles (1994). Bitton has worked extensively as an editor, associate editor and consulting editor, and on numerous feature films as a script supervisor, including Girlfight, by Karyn Kusama, and Lisbon Story, by Wim Wenders. She has taught film to psychiatric patients in Belgium and at the Bronx Children Hospital. She teaches editing and documentary filmmaking in the United States, France and Switzerland. The Rabbi’s 12 Children is her second feature-length documentary.
Festivals and Awards
- DOK Market Digital, Leipzig, 2007
- Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival, 2007
Credits
Producer: Yaël Bitton
Cinematographer: Yaël Bitton
Editor: François Sculier
Sound: Colette Constantini, Philippe Grivel
Music: Doug Wieselman
Print Source
Yael Bitton
Ephemeral Pictures
Email: yaelbitton@earthlink.net
Website: www.yaelbitton.com
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