For further information please download the respective Forum Expanded sheet (PDF).
Holot is a detention center in the Israeli desert near the Egyptian border. It houses asylum-seekers from Eritrea and Sudan who can’t be sent back to their own countries, but who have no prospects in Israel either thanks to the country’s policies. Theater director Chen Alon and filmmaker Avi Mograbi decide to initiate a theater workshop with these people in the most precarious of situations. The structured-improvisatory composition Pana Ha'Geshem was devised by Noam Enbar and performed in collaboration with the workshop participants. It takes a popular Israeli agricultural song, associated with the kibbutz movement, turning it into an expressive polyphonic chant. The single-channel video installation was created in the framework of the documentary film Between Fences (2016) by Avi Mograbi and Chen Alon, which was presented in the Forum in 2016.
Noam Enbar, born in 1978 in Tel-Aviv, Israel, is a singer, composer, and performer. He is the founder of the radical post-rock band Habiluim and the klezmer-anarcho-punk ensemble Oy Division. He has written music for a number of films, theater, and dance pieces. In 2015, he founded his own ensemble, The Great Gehenna Choir, which performs his original music. Since 2012, Enbar teaches composition and choir classes at the Musrara School of Art, Jerusalem.
Production: Les Films d'Ici, Paris
Camera: Philippe Bellaiche
Cast: Awet Asheber, Dawit Tsegai, Nouraldin Musa, Liat Boltsman
Format: single-channel video installation, color
Running time: 17 min
Language: Hebrew
Photo: © Noam Enbar
