The film festival in Haifa, which will be held soon, will award an annual prize for a script with a plot that takes place in the city. It’s only worth tens of thousands of shekels, but it is the only money awarded in the local movie industry as an incentive to produce a film in a given location.
The Israeli cinema industry is concentrated in Tel Aviv. The actors and the film crews live in the big city. All the unions start their meter ticking the minute they leave the Tel Aviv city limits. When the film crew travels ninety minutes each way to a film location, the travel time is counted as work hours. When you pay an actor $500 per day and a similar wage to a senior crew member, the prize distributed by the Haifa fund is swallowed up by the movie expenses.
Director Eran Riklis won the Haifa prize for his script for the movie “Volcan Junction”, the story of a local rock group against the background of the Yom Kippur War, which was screened last year. A few days ago, Riklis returned from Yeruham, in the Negev, where he finished shooting “The Truck”, a miniseries with three episodes, which Telad will screen at the end of the year.
The Yeruham municipality, like Haifa, has an interest in encouraging film crews to work in its town. It’s good for public relations and the town’s image. In the US, for example, every town takes pains to attract film crews to shoot there. The Yeruham town council cooperated with Riklis. The city administration helped him move garbage bins out of camera range and gave him a room in the local community center, but no financial aid. He paid for the policemen, just like any other production. In a development town with social problems, Riklis says, you shouldn’t expect financial support.
”I don’t film outside of Tel Aviv in order to lower production costs. Going to the outlying area is an ideological decision. I could have shot scenes in “The Truck” in a Tel Aviv mall. Malls are the same anywhere. But I got it into my head to take a 30-man film crew and go down to Yeruham and set them up in field conditions for over a month of shooting,” Riklis declares.
The budget for “The Truck” was $370,000 for three episodes, an impossible budget, according to Riklis. Another way of controlling expenses outside Tel Aviv is to use local professional infrastructure. Israel currently has nearly 10 institutions teaching cinema, mostly in outlying areas. In “The Truck”, Riklis used students from Sapir Academic College in Sderot as cheap labor. It is hard to estimate the financial value, Riklis says, but these things add up.
Riklis grew up in Beer Sheva; the periphery is in his blood. Even when he filmed “Zohar” in the Mizrahi neighborhood of Rishon LeZion, the birthplace of Zohar Argov, an Israeli music icon and the subject of the movie, he felt far away from Tel Aviv. Another director who insists on filming in distant locations is Daniel Wachsman. All his films - from "Hamsin" (1982) to his latest, "Bar Mitzva" - were filmed in the Safed, Rosh Pina, Kiryat Shemona region. It’s not patriotism, he says; he makes movies in the region simply because he lives there.
”Do the municipalities give me money? No. Services? No. Everything is more expensive in the Galilee – car rentals, hotel stays. I’m trying to make a deal with them now, but they aren’t so eager. Arkia Airlines also wants its pound of flesh; they don’t even give discounts. I have to fly crew members home to Tel Aviv for weekends. I told them the move would be good for the region. They aren’t interested; they have a monopoly,” Wachsman complains.
Wachsman doesn’t believe mayors will encourage the industry to come to them. Actually, he shudders at the thought. “Mayors would want to see the script. ‘What, the hero throws a grenade under the car? A neighborhood is infested with drugs? No way!’ The public doesn’t see a place in the movie and say, ‘Wow, Netanya’s a great town. Let’s go out to see it.’ When I shot “Bar Mitzva”, I didn’t highlight the tourist attractions; I featured the people living there.”
Like the Negev, the Galilee has no professional infrastructure. There is no good makeup artist, not even a good costume designer in the area. In contrast to Riklis, Wachsman doesn’t believe the colleges in the outlying areas will produce any movie industry professionals. In his opinion, most of these colleges are unnecessary. They mostly provide a living for teachers; they don’t produce good professionals. He has used students from the Tel Hai Regional College, “but they don’t know anything; they come to me to find out how to make a movie.”
After a year, Riklis returned to the Haifa Festival with a finished movie, “Volcan Junction.” They like the film in Haifa, and it got another prize – NIS 100,000. In a series of phone calls attempting to discover the exact amount of the prize this year, this reporter was told it was by no means sure that it would be awarded.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on August 26, 2001