Third Tel-Aviv International Student Film Festival Takes Place

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 the Tel Aviv University’s film department in June 1986, the biennial festival is one of the preeminent and most prestigious student film festivals worldwide. Annually, hundreds of films are presented in two categories: international films, and Israeli films.

Guests and judges of the festival has 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; 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 will go on to win the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 1991.    Oplev will later direct 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 served 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 their website.

The photo shows a poster from the 1990 festival.   Photo Source: Tel-Aviv International Student Film Festival.