“A Lullaby For The Valley” Film and Post Film Discussion with the filmmaker Ben Shani and Eli Shamir in conversation with Avi Ben Hur

Classrooms Without Borders, in partnership with Rodef Shalom Congregation and Film Pittsburgh’s JFILM Festival, is excited to offer the opportunity to watch the film “A Lullaby For The Valley” and engage in a post-film discussion with the filmmaker Ben Shani and Eli Shamir in conversation with Avi Ben Hur.
Eli Shamir is an artist, Born in the Jezreel Valley, he captures its ever-changing natural scenery and its people. Among esteemed conceptual painters on the art scene, Shamir has always been considered exceptional, but despite his lack of recognition in the world of art, he has never changed course.

Ben Shani fell in love with the artist, and with his camera, accompanied Shamir for 10 years, finding in him a source of inspiration for his own work.

Six years ago, the ‘plot-line’ of Shamir’s story reached a turning point when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. From that moment on, Shani’s film began following how the artist coped with the disease through his creations.

Is it disease or advancing age that carries Eli Shamir to a new burst of creativity?

Go2Films // A Lullaby to the Valley Trailer from Go2Films on Vimeo.

Ben Shani

Ben Shani is a documentary filmmaker, and an Israeli journalist. Shani is a senior correspondent and a member of the editorial staff of the most widely watched current affairs tv program in Israel “UVDA” (Hebrew for ‘Fact’). In 2019 Ben Shani won The Israeli Academy of Film and Television Award – for best Documentary Director. His TV series The Kirshenbaum Diaries, won the Israeli Academy Award for best Documentary series of the Year 2018. Shani is a Sokolov Prize winner for 2005, the most prestigious journalistic award in Israel. In his films, he has featured many of the leading Israeli political figures and other prominent personages, among them President Shimon Peres, Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon Yitzhak Rabin as well as Warren Buffett and others.

Eli Shamir

Elie Shamir was born in 1953, in Kfar Yehoshua, Israel.

Since graduating from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Shamir has participated in many exhibitions in Israel and abroad. After years spent in Jerusalem and Boston, Shamir returned to Kfar Yehoshua village in 1999 and resettled there, as the third generation of the place’s founders.

The issue of place is present with great force and complexity in Shamir’s work; aspects of this issue pertain, among others, to that tangled knot which is tied and unraveled throughout the generations between the Jew and the land, between the immigrant and the native-born, between the local Arab and the Hebrew pioneer and his vision, between the farmer and his field.

The clumps of earth in Shamir’s paintings are placed on geological strata charged with biblical past, with primeval culture, with Zionist history, with socio-economic ideology, with artistic tradition but also with his own personal family story. Kfar Yehoshua is both a personal, specific case of an agricultural village in the valley of Jezre’el, and the story of a local ethos and starting point for fundamental questions about place.

Education

More information about the post screening discussion is coming soon!