A Hole in the Moon

77 Minutes, 1964
Genre:
Feature
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Directed by: Uri Zohar
Production:Mordechai Navon
Production Company:Geva Films Ltd.
Photographer: David Gurfinkel
Narrator: Uri Zohar
Language: Hebrew
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Subtitles: English, Hebrew

mos Kenan wrote the script for Hole in the Moon whilst Uri Zohar was entrusted with directing this pioneering avant-garde piece that changed the landscape of Israeli cinema in the 1960s. The film opens with a delusional duo who find themselves in the heart of a void. One of them showed up on a rickety raft, whilst the other seems to have materialised literally out of nowhere. The pair decide to create something they could both live off and hold onto – a film studio. Their goal: a film project chronicling both the history of Israel and of global cinema. High-stakes auditions are held; a whole city made of cardboard and glue is erected and with that, it’s onward with the dream!
Soon enough, chaos ensues which further escalates over time as a growing cast of absurd characters come on the set. These characters start living life by their own rules and it isn’t long before they’ve completely taken over the protagonists’ world. Zohar made the film at a time when he was influenced by experimental filmmaker Adolfas Mekas’ Hallelujah for the Hills, and was able to enlist a host of his high-profile friends from Tel Aviv’s then-bohemian scene to appear in it, including Dahn Ben-Amotz, Abraham Heffner, Shmulik Kraus, Shoshik Shani, Arik Lavie and Shaike Ophir . Among other things, the film seeks to lampoon the Zionist narrative myth and the ethos of Zionist propaganda films which, according to Israeli film scholars, fall into the nationalist-heroic genre. Critics and academics alike consider the film a milestone in the development of local cinema, and it is commonly viewed as a harbinger of The New Sensibility wave that evolved in 1960s and ‘70s Israeli cinema, boasting films with distinct modernist features that were deeply influenced by the European cinema of that time, especially the New French Wave.

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