?Dear Administration and Members of the Community, As a proud figure in our community today and someone who is very passionate about Israeli history, I would like to organize a Movie Night program. The Movie Night program will be followed by a short discussion. I am writing to you all because I feel as though it is extremely important to discuss explain why the culture of Israel through the medium cinema. There are several advantages of learning from films rather than learning through other forms of representation. During the program I will show ten movies that clearly illustrate the changes in Israeli society throughout the past century. Watching and analyzing major Israeli films, we will explore the intensity of the place, its trends throughout history, and see how filmmakers respond both to the dreams and the reality of modern Israel. The program will mostly explore the tensions between “the individual” and “the collective” as it pertains to Zionism, gender and sexuality, religion, the conflict with Arabs, and Mizrahi ethnicity. The films that will be viewed throughout the program will relate to each other in many ways. The relations will be thematic as well as artistic. There is no reason why after reading this letter you will have a problem sponsoring this great program. As the program begins we will go in depth and talk about the beginning stages of Israeli film. Noah Sokolovsky’s 1913 film, Eretz Yisrael, is a qualified starter film when talking about the very early stages of film in Israel. Noah Sokolovsky’s voyage started in Odessa in April 1913 as he boarded a ship towards Israel along with almost 100 Jews. The film crew arrived in Jaffa and wherever they went people would crowd the streets. The film showed Jaffa’s teacher’s school and Gymnasia, Tel-Aviv’s main school. Some of the clips showed the establishing of orange industries and showed camels carrying the crates to Jaffa for export. It also showed wine vineyards as well as some residents leaving the synagogue after services. The synagogue was called Zichron Yaakov. Another clip showed a man with one arm plowing behind a horse. One of the last clips shows a festival and crowds and crowds of people. It also showed Jewish athletes in some sort of sport presentation. Overall, the film expresses that the lives of the residents in Palestine during 1913 were lively and most importantly productive. Of course this was all 35 years before Israel was founded. This movie was to show how nice and easy-going life was in Palestine. The biggest goal for these filmmakers was that they wanted to spread the idea of Zionism. The next movie night program will be Yet another movie that shows the moving and inching towards “the collective” is Helmar Lerski’s Avodah. This film was a milestone documentary that celebrates the early pioneers that settled in Palestine. With surprisingly adequate visual compositions for that time and a pleasant soundtrack by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, this movie shows the technological and agricultural feats of the early Israeli settlers. It also applauds the ideas of a new Jewish state. Most of the clips taken from the movie are shots from the Jaffa Port in Tel-Aviv. Other short clips are of several kibbutzim at that time. Helmar Lerski had an expressive style that created a very mythic image of the common Jew in Palestine. The settlers were showed triumphing amidst the sweeping desert landscape. What people should take away from the movie is that it was mainly a propaganda film, feeding the spread of Zionism. It was to show the strengthening of the land, the overall agriculture booming and shows the redemptive efforts of the early Jewish settlers. One point that will also be talked about in the discussions is that compared to other films at this time, this one in particular has cinematic language. It doesn't have a narration but at the same time it has these accepted conventions or methods by which movies communicate. Other topics that would be discussed are the ongoing push for masculinity among Jews and how women weren't really very relevant until much later. As we move on in time twenty or thirty years later we arrive at the heroic years in Israel. The discussions that will take place after the movie is shown are those that involve the heroic years. The heroic genre years started in the forties and are still going on through the present day. The basis of these years show mainly wars. These years go from the Independence Wars, all the way through the First and Second Lebanon Wars. Thorold Dickinson goes along with the underlying theme of these years in his 1955 classic, "Hill 24 Doesn't Answer." This theory of how Israeli soldiers have been fighting for their land with such heroism and devotion for their country is represented fully in this film. The movie is taken from a predominantly Israeli point of view. The main points in the film are voiced out with a bit of conviction and confi