My Terrorist

A film by Yulie Cohen

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SYNOPSIS

In 1978, filmmaker Yulie Cohen was wounded in a terrorist attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A stewardess for the Israeli airline El Al, she was attacked along with other crewmembers when getting off the bus to the hotel in London. In a remarkable twist of faith, twenty-three years later Cohen began questioning the causes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians and started to consider helping release the man who almost killed her, Fahad Mihyi.

From the time she was a young girl, Cohen considered herself a staunch Israeli nationalist. Growing up in an upper middle class neighborhood in Israel (where her neighbors included future Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Arik Sharon, and military hero Moshe Dayan), she patriotically served in the military. After working as an Israel coordinator on a film shoot and visiting the occupied territories, Cohen came to realize that both Israelis and Palestinians played a role in perpetuating the cycle of hostility and bloodshed. It was her goal to stand up as a survivor and call for reconciliation on each side. An inspiring story of forgiveness, Cohen’s poignant documentary is a moving testimony of human compassion and a call for peace.

PRESS

“…bracingly honest…her incredible courage is an example to us all...”

Noah Cowan indieWire

“It's an act of reconciliation, which is also politically very unpopular in Israel at this violent and volatile time. We applaud her courage for inviting us on her journey as she wrestled with and eventually overcame her own doubts.”

IDFA, Silver Wolf Jury

"A critical and much-needed expression of importance of dissent, particularly Jewish dissent, within the discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ethic of dissent and its crucial importance in remaking a world gone wrong is a core tenet of Judaism and one which is too often forgotten ...[Gerstel's]films show why we must try to create a world where affirmation is possible and dissent is mandatory, where our capacity to witness is not only restored but sanctioned."

Dr. Sara Roy Senior Research Scholar Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

“With a searing honesty, [Cohen’s films] lead you through a personal and sometimes grueling process of trying to make sense of the relationship between past and present, the individual and the collective, the self and the ‘other.’”

Emily Gottreich Vice Chair, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Univ. of California at Berkeley

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

Human Rights Watch Film Festival
San Francisco International Film Festival
Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival - Silver Wolf Competition
Jerusalem Film Festival - Special Jury Prize
One World – International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival
DC International Film Festival
Seattle Jewish Film Festival
Toronto Jewish Film Festival
Montreal Jewish Film Festival
Jeonju International Film Festival
Vancouver Jewish Film Festival
Denmark National Film Festival
Shorts and Docs Reykjavik
Femme Totale Film Festival, Germany
Infinity Festival, Italy
Gene Siskel Film Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Yulie Cohen

Yulie Cohen earned a degree in Sociology & Anthropology from Tel Aviv University (1981), and an MA with distinction in Communication Arts from the New York Institute of Technology (1984). She worked in films in New York and Los Angeles, returning to Israel in 1988 for the birth of the first of two daughters.

Since 1993, Yulie has directed and/or produced many documentaries, including:

My Terrorist (2002), financed by ZDF/ARTE, The Danish Film Institute, the BBC, YLE Finland, and TV2 Denmark, which received a special jury prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival, was Silver Wolf nominee at IDFA, was awarded the Provincia di Cuneo Prize (2003) and the European Prize Ilaria Alpi Journalistic Television.(2004) The film was translated into 20 languages, broadcasted in 21 countries and screened at more than 100 film festivals around the world.

My Land Zion (2004), financed by ZDF/ARTE, The Danish Film Institute, the BBC, VRT Belgium, YLE Finland, and TV2 Denmark was broadcast in more than ten countries, and screened at many film festivals. The Art of Film Prize was given to Yulie by the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2005.

My Brother (2007) premiered at Haifa International film festival and was transmitted outside Israel and by Channel 2 Israel with high ratings.

My Israel (2008), a compilation of the above mentioned trilogy produced and directed by Cohen, was commissioned by Nick Fraser for BBC4, Storyville, and was transmitted on Israel sixty's anniversary on May 2008. It was supported by Israel Gesher fund and transmitted at DRtv, DK and Israel's documentary channel- YesDocu. The four films have been shown in Israel and abroad followed by discussions.

A Minor Shrine For Our Love was curated by Adi Englman in 2014 for Dani Karavan's exhibition 50 years of the Negev Monument in The Negev Museum of Art.

Our Natural Right was created for Channel 12, Israel.

Since 2008, she has been teaching at Bezalel Academy of the Arts and Design Jerusalem. She is currently working on Who Killed Jessica? an animated documentary co-production with France, Belgium and Germany.

For more information visit yuliecohen.wix.com/yuliecohen. (07/19)

Subject Areas

Arab Jewish Studies Middle East Terrorism

My Israel – Revisiting the Trilogy

Few filmmakers have probed issues of Israeli nationalism and Israeli-Palestinian relations more completely or intimately than Tel Aviv-born Yulie Cohen. In My Israel, Cohen revisits her acclaimed trilogy My Terrorist (2002), My Land Zion (2004), and My Brother (2007) with new footage, fresh perspective, and her trademark fearlessness. For Cohen, Israel is the land of her ancestors, the land her parents fought for during the 1948 war and the land she herself served as an Air Force Officer during the Entebbe crisis. In 1978, working as an El Al stewardess, she survived a terrorist attack in London that killed a colleague and left her with shrapnel in her arm. Embarking on a difficult and emotional journey, she attempts to free the surviving terrorist who attacked her, to question the myths of the state that she grew up in, and to reconcile with her ultra-orthodox brother after 25 years of estrangement. My Israel is an account of remarkable courage and understanding set against the last turbulent decade of Israeli history, successfully combining Cohen’s 10-year oeuvre in an incisive and refreshing new way.

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Ever Shot Anyone?

Israeli filmmaker Michal Aviad provides a woman's take on how national culture is informed by male identity through the military experience that bonds her country's Jewish men. EVER SHOT ANYONE? documents Aviad's attempt to infiltrate the world of army reservists during their annual tour of duty on the Golan Heights. Gradually, but not without suspicion and hostility toward the intruder in their midst, the middle-aged civilian-soldiers reveal notions about male identity, friendship, family and gender relations. This dominant male culture through the eyes of the ultimate outsider--a woman.

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For My Children

In October 2000, as the second Palestinian Intifada erupts, Israeli filmmaker Michal Aviad begins an exploration about both the moral and mundane dilemmas she faces every day in Tel Aviv. What begins with deceptive simplicity-a tender scene of sending the children off to school-quickly becomes a profound study of vulnerability and anxiety. Small acts like crossing the street are charged with inescapable fear. As the nightmare of violence escalates over the coming months, Michal and her husband Shimshon ask the quintessential Diaspora Jewish question, "When is it time to go?" The question reverberates through a stream of images-public and private, home video and historic archival footage-as her parents and extended family recount their own journeys to Israel from Europe, escaping death and the Holocaust, and from America, out of ideological commitment to Israel. Their stories are told with vivid, beautiful detail-at a bucolic family picnic, during a vacation on the California coast-and with a degree of candor and intimacy rarely seen in Israeli cinema. "I don't want to be an immigrant," says Shimshon, a political activist whose profound feelings about displacement and exile are interwoven with TV images of war, children asleep in their beds, grandma making pasta and the sounds of sirens. Tanks roll over the hills as tea is being made in the kitchen in a cosmic seesaw between blissful domesticity and the nightmare of public life, in this deeply moving and riveting video essay. -Deborah Kaufman

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Ramleh

A timely and powerful look at the ideological, cultural and political conflicts in contemporary Israel, this highly original documentary profiles three seemingly disparate women residing in the town of Ramleh. Located in the heartland of the Israel, this former Palestinian territory serves as a microcosm of the beliefs, biases and conflicts of women living in the country today. Profiled in this compelling documentary are Sima and Orly, two ultra-orthodox Jewish women who rediscover religion and enthusiastically support the conservative “Shas” party, the third largest political party in Israel; Svetlana, a single-mother and recent immigrant struggling to establish herself in her new country; and Gehad, a young Muslim teacher and law student attempting to find a sense of national identity in a predominately Jewish state. Filmed between the general elections in 1999 and the 2001 elections, Ramleh demonstrates the profound cultural and political divisions barring these women from living together as a united community, as well as reveals how their political landscape helped sow the seeds of the intifada in 2000. It similarly raises the question of whether each woman and the communities they represent will ever peacefully reconcile their search for tradition, religion and homeland.

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OUR CATALOG

My Terrorist

SYNOPSIS

PRESS

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Subject Areas

RELATED LINKS

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN

My Israel – Revisiting the Trilogy

Ever Shot Anyone?

For My Children

Ramleh