The third Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival opens in the Adolfo and Thelma Fastlicht Auditorium in the Mexico Arts Building on the campus of Tel Aviv University. Founded by students and faculty of Tel Aviv University’s film department in June 1986, the biennial festival is one of the pre-eminent student film festivals worldwide. Each festival presents hundreds of films in two categories: international and Israeli.
Guests and judges of the festival have included Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos; American director Paul Mazursky; the first Israeli nominated for an Academy Award, Uri Barbash; Canadian actor, writer and director Sarah Polley; American producer Jan Harlan; South Korean director Kim Jee-woon; French filmmaker known for his 1985 Holocaust documentary, Shoah, Claude Lanzmann; and an Academy Award-winning producer of Forrest Gump, Steve Tisch.
The winning films and artists at the 1990 festival are Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev for Hugo From Himmerland; American Alan Taylor for That Burning Question; American Adam Davidson for The Lunch Date; Mexican Luis Carlos for Weed; and Israeli Shachar Segal for Ganimed.
Davidson’s The Lunch Date goes on to win the Academy Award for best live action short film in 1991. Oplev later directs the original Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, while Taylor becomes a television director for award-winning shows including The Sopranos, Mad Men and Game of Thrones, for which he also serves as co-executive producer.
At the inaugural festival in 1986, legendary feminist and avant-garde film director Chantal Akerman is honored as the official “Guest of Honor.” In the international competition, American animator Joanna Priestley, now a well respected, award-winning filmmaker, is given top prizes for her short “Voices.”
In 2016, the festival celebrates its 30th anniversary with an incredibly detailed archive of past participants, guests, judges and award winners, along with posters from each year and short video clips available on the festival website.
