Winners
Winner 2009
Noa Ben Hagai
Noa Ben Hagai, a 38 year-old filmmaker from Israel, received a $5,000 award for her project “Blood Relation”
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
At 14 my grandmother’s sister disappeared from her home in Israel. Years later, she started sending my family letters with a desperate plea for contact, from a refugee camp, where she lived as an Arab. My Jewish family chose to turn their back on their Arab relative.
I discovered her letters after my grandmother died and I set on a painful quest, uncovering the past. I search for my lost family in territories occupied by my country and reveal a story that could only be told in the war-torn Middle East, about one family, on both sides of a conflict.
My film “Blood Relation” documents the evolving relationship of two cousins, my uncle, Shmulik, a retired army general in the Israeli army, and Salma, a Palestinian woman living in a refugee camp.
I want to thank the Alter-Ciné foundation for providing funds for this film. Not only did the grant assisted me in exploring the past, it also provided me with some of the resources to film for four years the subtle intricacies of the evolving relationship between Salma and Shmulik, as they break bread together, and cope with their fears and mistrusts as Salma’s son is arrested by the IDF in suspicion of terrorist activities.
The Foundation support allowed me to explore what it means to be a family in the context of a prolonged occupation. In Israel the film has sparked lively conversations about the conflict… offering its Israeli viewers new insights about reality and themselves. It is like gazing intimately into a mirror.
– Noa Ben Hagai