Avraham Heffner was a Haifa-born director, screenwriter, author, and film university professor. In his youth, he served in the IDF’s musical group, Lehakat Hanachal, along with Uri Zohar, Chaim Topol and Nechama Hendel. Heffner studied English Literature and Philosophy at the Hebrew University and later, continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris where he further pursued Philosophy, as well as American Literature. His philosophy studies next took him to New York City where he also took up film studies and later, whilst there, directed three shorts, including The Most Wonderful Religious Conversion of Young Hamlet (1963). In 1967, he made Slow Down, an adaptation of a short story by Simone de Beauvoir which won him the Best Short Film Award at the Venice Film Festival.
Heffner is known to have been part of the New Sensitivity; a group of filmmakers who were making artistic, European-style, and avantgarde-influenced films which stood in contrast to the then-popular, Israeli working class comedies and melodramas (aka ‘Bourekas films.’) A standout film within this genre was But Where is Daniel Wax? which Heffner wrote and directed in 1972, and that has since won a great deal of acclaim. He later went on to make three additional feature films: Aunt Clara (1979), The Winchell Affair (1982), and The Last Love of Laura Adler (1990).
Heffner also appeared as an actor in numerous films and television series. He created the children’s programme, The Magic Door, spent years lecturing about film and screenwriting at various academic institutions, and published a string of original novels. In 2004, the Israeli Film Academy named him the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Ophir Award for his extraordinary contributions to Israeli filmmaking. Avraham Heffner passed away in September 2014. He was 79.
