Leon Edery (1948-2018) was a film producer and distributor. He was also one of the owners of production and distribution company United King Films, and multiplex cinema chain ‘Cinema City.’ He and his younger brother, Moshe, are in no small part responsible for the huge creative resurgence in the Israeli film industry since the turn of the 21st century.
Tangiers-born Edery moved to Israel with his family in his youth. The family settled in the southern town of Dimona where, in his teens, he started working as a film projectionist in a local cinema. In 1978 he – along with younger sibling, Moshe – founded United King Films. Initially launched as a distribution company, the first major blockbuster it brought to Israeli cinemas was Richard Donner’s Superman which came out that same year. Over the new few years, the Edery brothers started acquiring multiple properties including Tel Aviv’s Maxim and Ophir cinemas. In the early noughties, they opened Cinema City – a state-of-the-art cinema multiplex just outside Tel Aviv. On the heels of its massive success, subsequent multiplexes followed across the country, including in Jerusalem and Rishon LeZion. The Ederys later also took over local cabler YES’s Israeli film channel. As of now, United King Films’ catalogue is the largest of its kind in Israel.
In the early noughties Moshe and Leon Edery also ventured into film production. In 2004, they produced Avi Nesher’s Turn Left at the End of the World – a box office monster hit that drew over half a million people to cinemas. Two Joseph Cedar films also produced by the siblings, Beaufort (2007) and Footnote (2011), both earned an Oscar nomination in the Best Foreign Language Film category.
Highlights of his other production credits include: Metallic Blues (Dan Verete, 2004), Walk on Water (Eytan Fox, 2004), Colombian Love (Shay Kanot, 2004), The Bubble (Eytan Fox, 2006), The Debt (Assaf Bernstein, 2007), The Secrets (Avi Nesher, 2007), Lost Islands (Reshef Levi, 2008), Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, 2009), This is Sodom (Adam Sanderson, Muli Segev, Dror Shohet, 2010), Big Bad Wolves (Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado, 2013), Hunting Elephants (Reshef Levi, 2013), Youth (Tom Shoval, 2013), Princess (Tali Shalom-Ezer, 2014), Apples From the Desert (Matti Harari & Arik Lubetzki, 2014), Next to Her (Asaf Korman, 2014), Wounded Land (Erez Tadmor, 2015), Fire Birds (Amir Wolf, 2015), The Kind Words (Shemi Zarhin, 2015), Sand Storm (Elite Zexer, 2016), and Forgiveness [posthumously released] (Guy Amir & Hanan Savion, 2019).
