The 42nd Jerusalem Film Festival will open on July 17, which brings to mind thoughts of its founder, Lia van Leer, who passed away 10 years ago.
Van Leer, who was first and foremost a movie lover, had a critical role in creating the Israeli cinephile culture and movie industry. Besides the long-running festival, she created the Jerusalem Cinematheque, which she ran from its opening until her death, and the cinematheques in Tel Aviv and Haifa, as well as the Israel Film Archive.
I was fortunate to interview her many times and spend time with her when she was in her element, at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and the film festival. For those who knew her, the festival always brings up memories of her. She was brilliant, visionary, charming, hardworking, funny, ambitious, extremely cultured, demanding, and imperious, so it’s no accident that she was eulogized by many as “the queen of Israeli cinema.”
Like all royalty, she would have been pleased to know that she was not the end of the line. If I could send a message back to her in 2015 that would have comforted her when she fell ill, I would have told her that in 2025, the Jerusalem Film Festival and the Jerusalem Cinematheque, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, have not just survived but are thriving.
I would also let her know that a conflict with Iran did not derail plans for the 42nd edition of the festival. And that Israeli-born Hollywood superstar Gal Gadot and producer Lawrence Bender – whose movies, among them Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, have won nine Oscars – will be attending to accept the festival’s lifetime achievement awards.
And that in spite of the logistical difficulties of organizing a festival during a war, there will be about 200 new movies from 45 countries on the program, as well as pitching and industry events – and, of course, classics. The various Israeli competitions, in which some of the most acclaimed Israeli movies of all time have premiered – such as Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit; Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani’s Ajami; and Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon – are filled with new movies, many of which will likely go on to international success.
Younger, older, and lavender
Another update I could give her, which would likely cheer her up as much as anything, is that the festival is the place to be for Jerusalem’s young people during its 10-day annual run. Young cineastes alternate between watching movies and sitting out in the garden, meeting their friends and having drinks and pizza.
The Jerusalem Film Festival appeals to a young audience, whose members have grown up seeing classics and art house films at the festival and the Cinematheque.
She would be especially pleased by how first Noa Regev and now Roni Mahadav-Levin have continued her work as the CEO of the Jerusalem Cinematheque, and how Elad Samorzik and, recently, Orr Sigoli, has taken on the role of artistic director of the festival.
Van Leer always looked extremely happy as she walked through the garden in between movies during the festival. She was an instantly recognizable figure, usually dressed in her trademark lavender-colored outfits as she chatted with old friends, new friends, filmmakers, actors, and anyone who had come to the event and wanted to speak to her.
She handed out sachets of lavender as gifts. I still have mine on my desk.
Alphabet soup of stars
While a half century ago Jerusalem was considered something of a cultural backwater compared to Tel Aviv, through van Leer’s intense perseverance and power of persuasion she made the Jerusalem Cinematheque and then the Jerusalem Film Festival into world-renowned institutions and events. Countless movie stars and important filmmakers have attended the festival over the years.
Van Leer started it off on a grand scale in 1984 with an incredible trio of guests: heartthrob turned serious actor and director Warren Beatty; silent-movie icon Lillian Gish; and French New Wave actress Jeanne Moreau, who starred in Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim.
The movie maven knew everybody who was anybody in the industry, in both Hollywood and Europe, and was happy to gossip about them, once you got to know her. About Moreau, she told me – off the record, although she later spoke about the incident in a series of interviews that were published as a 2016 tribute book, Lia in Her Own Words (Halban Publishers) – that the festival put the French actress up at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim guest house and arts center, right near van Leer’s own home in Yemin Moshe and a short walk from the Cinematheque.
Mishkenot is the classiest place to stay in Jerusalem and strictly by invitation only, but it didn’t impress Moreau, who was upset that she wasn’t getting as much press attention as Lillian Gish, and also that there were no amenities like a hairdresser, a manicurist, and room service. Van Leer told me that she arranged for Moreau to be pampered like a diva after the star complained.
Over the years, the festival has hosted a veritable Who’s Who of filmmakers and actors, among them Chantal Akerman, Fanny Ardant, Roberto Benigni, Jane Birkin, Roger Corman, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Robert De Niro, Kirk Douglas, Steven Frears, Spike Jonze, Chen Kaige, Elia Kazan, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Ang Lee, Claude Lelouch, Richard Linklater, Dusan Makavejev, Terrence Malick, John Malkovich, David Mamet, Chris Marker, Rashid Mashrawi, Marcello Mastroianni, Deepa Mehta, Anthony Minghella, Nanni Moretti, Errol Morris, Manoel de Oliveira, Nagisa Oshima, Ulrike Ottinger, Roman Polanski, Sally Potter, Francesco Rosi, John Schlesinger, Ettore Scola, Elia Suleiman, Bertrand Tavernier, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Guiseppe Tornatore, Liv Ullman, Margarethe von Trotta, Wim Wenders, and Michael Winterbottom.
Doing it with style, and perseverance
I knew of van Leer only by reputation when I moved to Israel in 2000 after having worked as a film critic at the New York Post, and I was knocked out by the variety at the Jerusalem Film Festival and dazzled by its creator’s charm when I tracked her down to write about the festival.
I was used to the New York Film Festival, which is an important event, but where only about two dozen movies are shown, most of them by established filmmakers. The Jerusalem Film Festival is modeled on the much larger and more elaborate European festivals like Cannes, Berlin, and Venice.
The Jerusalem Festival used to sponsor a critics’ preview weekend – a more modest version of which continues to this day – in which dozens of movies that were scheduled to be shown would be pre-screened over a two-day period. In the evening, van Leer treated the critics to a dinner catered by one of the city’s finest restaurants and served by waiters in the garden.
I was enchanted as our wine glasses were filled and refilled, and the waiters ground coffee beans for individual espressos. But the Israeli critics had gotten used to such luxuries and groused that there was only one imported beer being served.
Everything van Leer did, she did with style. When Eran Riklis’s film The Syrian Bride, about a Druze family on the Syrian border, had its premiere at the festival in 2004, the reception was catered by the celebrated east Jerusalem restaurant Philadelphia. When John Malkovich was a festival guest in 2008, van Leer had the festival make up hundreds of masks with his face on them so that when he walked into his master class, the audience held them up, recreating a famous scene in the movie about him, Being John Malkovich.
Our most memorable interview took place during the darkest days of the Second Intifada, in the summer of 2002, when terrorism was rampant in Jerusalem. She spoke candidly about the difficulties of organizing a film festival in this climate: “Festival means ‘celebration,’ and this is a hard year to celebrate. I feel like that quote from [Samuel] Beckett – you know the one I mean [at the end of his 1953 novel The Unnamable] – ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’ We have to go on.
“I feel the films this year will not only be an escape for people but also may be a way of helping them understand things better – that’s what I hope,” she said then.
“I’m not interested in just having the premiere of a popular American film that will play here anyway. I want to show films that wouldn’t be seen here otherwise, to give people a look at different worlds.”
Lia and Wim: Missionary movie zeal
Van Leer knew more than a little about different worlds.
Born Lia Greenberg in the Bessarabian city of Balti, which was then part of Romania and is now in Moldova, she came to Palestine in 1940 to visit her sister, who had been living here for several years. She soon realized that she could never go home, due to the war. While she was in Tel Aviv, she got the worst possible news from home – the Nazis had murdered her entire family.
And so she “went on,” even before Beckett had said to, studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1952, she married Wim van Leer, an intellectual Dutchman who was an engineer, industrialist, pilot, and playwright. Wim was very wealthy, and they could have lived anywhere. But they were Zionists and settled in Haifa, although they continued to travel the world for his business. “I just schlepped along,” said Lia, which was obviously something of an understatement.
The two shared a love of movies, and wherever they went they saw the latest and best films, acquiring prints of many of them to bring back to Israel. These films, which eventually formed the basis for the Israel Film Archive, were originally stored in their apartment. While there were movie theaters in Israel in the early days of the state, they tended to play only the most commercial films, and many areas of the country had no cinemas at all.
With the zeal of missionaries, the van Leers traveled the country via crop-dusting planes, bringing movies to isolated areas. Once the Israel Film Archive was established, van Leer she made sure that it housed a copy of every movie made in Israel, as well as many foreign films.
ONCE VAN LEER founded the festival, very few guests she invited refused to come for political reasons. She was an unapologetic leftist and made sure to show movies by Israeli Arab and Palestinian filmmakers, such as Tawfik Abu Wael, whose 2004 film Atash won the festival’s top prize. She would likely have been pleased that Eid by Yousef Abo Madegem, the first full-length movie by a Bedouin director, won the prize for Israeli feature film in 2024.
While she had only one producing credit, on the Chris Marker documentary Description of a Struggle (aka Third Side of the Coin), she was an intrinsic part of the Israeli film industry, nurturing filmmakers.
Avi Nesher, the director of Israeli classics such as The Troupe and Turn Left at the End of the World – who left Israel for several years and returned in 2001, thanks in part to van Leer’s nudging – said in an interview after her death, “I compare her to Henri Langlois of the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. Like her, he was not a director, producer, writer, or actor but he made a tremendous contribution to French cinema.
“By collecting all Israeli movies and opening the cinematheques, she put an end to the bad habit critics had of saying some cinema was good and other kinds were bad,” Nesher said. “These critics tended to praise serious European films and put down every other kind, like movies by [Israeli directors of the 1960s and 1970s] Ephraim Kishon and Uri Zohar. Now, thanks to Lia, we have good movies and bad movies, not good genres and bad genres. Now Israeli directors are free to make the movies they want.”
Van Leer was also a die-hard secularist, who fought and won the right to show movies on Shabbat. In 2012, she clashed with ultra-Orthodox factions after posters for the festival were defaced all over Jerusalem because they featured the image of a woman. She spoke out angrily against this and had as many posters as possible replaced.
From crazy dreamer to Israel Prize winner
While the Jerusalem Film Festival and the Jerusalem Cinematheque may have seemed like a crazy dream at first, van Leer won recognition for them from the government when she was awarded the Israel Prize in 2004. While she was often opposed to government policy, she accepted the honor and held a party at the Cinematheque with her friends and colleagues to celebrate. She also received many international honors and was president of the jury at the 45th Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival.
Although she struggled with various health issues in her final years, she was a fixture at the Jerusalem Cinematheque until the day she died. She was present at every important event at the 2014 festival, the last one she attended. That year, there was also a war with Gaza. But while the traditional festive opening in the Sultan’s Pool Amphitheater could not be held due to the threat of bombings, the festival went on as scheduled, with few modifications.
While many guests from abroad were afraid to attend, her old friend playwright/screenwriter/director David Mamet did show up. She sat and listened intently as Mamet gave a reading of his novella, The Handle and the Hold, about US veterans and the birth of the Israeli air force, and the two of them headed out to dinner afterwards. Mamet is a big talker, but with van Leer on his arm, he listened.
Those who remember her will miss van Leer this year; but those too young to have known her will enjoy the festival – the way she would have wanted them to.