August 8, 1924
A pioneer in Israeli film, Lia Van Leer is born Lia Greenberg in Beltsy, Romania (today Moldova). Her parents are assimilated members of the middle class who are active in local Zionist organizations.
In 1940 she leaves on an extended trip to visit her sister, who lives in Tel Aviv and works as a dentist. She is still in Palestine when the Nazis invade Beltsy in summer 1941. Her father is murdered with other Jewish community leaders. Her mother and grandmother are deported to Ukraine, where they die in concentration camps. Lia remains in Palestine.
She moves to Jerusalem in 1943 to study humanities at the Hebrew University. There she meets her future husband, Wim Van Leer, an engineer who volunteers in the Israeli Air Force during the War of Independence in 1948. After the war, Wim founds a company that creates pesticides for agricultural use. Married in 1952, the two travel abroad frequently and develop an appreciation of cinema as an art form.
Describing the state of film culture in Israel in the early 1950s, Lia writes,
Here you had only commercial cinemas. You had no art cinemas. And you must remember that there was no television and no video. People had no chance to see Chaplin or Buster Keaton … or Greta Garbo. We thought we’ve got to bring films here because we felt it was like bringing books or paintings from a museum. (Shai Tsur, “Israel’s Great Lady of Film,” The Jerusalem Post, July 3, 1998, p. B2)
The Van Leers create the country’s first film society in Haifa in 1956. The film club evolves into the Haifa Cinemathèque. They create two other cinemathèques in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They travel the country, visiting settlements and kibbutzim and showing films that are otherwise not available in Israel.
They amass a significant collection of films, from which they create the country’s film archive in 1960. Today the Israel Film Archive is the largest in the Middle East. In 1999 the Knesset passes the Cinema Law, requiring that every film supported by an Israeli fund have a copy deposited in the Israel Film Archive.
With the help of Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, Lia creates a permanent home for the Jerusalem Cinemathèque and the Film Archive near the Old City in 1973. She directs the first Jerusalem Film Festival in May 1984 with 100 films from 20 countries.
She serves as a member of the jury at many prestigious film festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival, and is awarded an Israel Prize for her cultural achievements in 2004.
To read a June 2011 article about Lia Van Leer in Variety, click here.
