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"Why is he a hero? You would be hard pressed to find an Israeli who grew up in the 1990s and can't remember the first time he or she read 'Missing Kissinger'"

The "Tel Aviv Heroes" project also includes interviews with Dana International, Ohad Naharin and Tzipi Livni.

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I really think that when you write or make films, you try to show how you experience reality. I don’t experience it as realism, which is objective, and something people agree on. The moment you accept subjectiveness, it transcends realism - falling in love is like flying in the air. These experiences happen, and you check them against reality, and they are actually much more relevant than reality. It is a way to describe the world I live in.

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"My prime motivation to write stories," Keret said, "is that I want to read them. I would be very happy if somebody else had done it, but they're all lazy . . . , so I have to write it all by myself." As he tells it, his decision to direct "Jellyfish" was a similar story of picking up the slack from the goldbrickers out there.
"My wife wrote this wonderful script, and I said, 'I really want to see this film.' She showed it to one director who said it was never going to work. She showed it to another who said, 'This is boring.' The third one said, 'This is completely confused.' . . . The moment I suggested directing the film I looked at my wife's eye and knew if we didn't do it, this film will never be done."

“I write about the violence that I grew up with,” Keret says matter-of-factly. “In a country where, for three years out of their lives, everybody who is 18 lives in a reality where he may kill people or see people get killed next to him, he may do things Americans would never do. I didn’t serve in the occupied territories, but people who do know that if you knock on a door and it doesn’t open, you kick it open. You can play the guitar, read Nietzsche, become a very good dentist, but you’ll still do it. And once you cross that line, it’s very difficult to uncross it. When your girlfriend won’t talk to you and locks the door, you will still know how to kick it open.”

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By his own metric, Keret (whose last collection was The Nimrod Flipout) is the raging asthmatic of short-fiction writers, his words chosen and few, his stories issued with the urgency of an inhaler's blast.

Rarely are stories as economical as Keret's, and rarely are economical stories as affecting as these. Keret, an Israeli writer whose work has been featured on “This American Life” and “Selected Shorts,” explores the nature of violence and alienation from a surreal, whimsical perspective in writings that rarely exceeds five pages in length. Even the most impatient reader has time for these quick reads.

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This award-winning drama traces the paths of intersecting lives in Tel Aviv: a groom and his bride, an aimless young woman and a mysterious child, a Filipino caregiver and her cranky charge. The film is shot through with keen observations and dry wit, and has a refreshing, easygoing sense of flow. — Logan Hill

Village Voice

Bleakly wistful, regarding its essentially lonely characters with a gaze both tender and lethal, Jellyfish was co-directed by the bestselling Israeli writer Etgar Keret and his wife, dramatist-director Shira Geffen (who is credited with the screenplay)

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Etgar Keret is well-known internationally as a writer of offbeat, fragmentary short stories -- his latest collection, "The Nimrod Flipout," has been highly praised in the U.S. and British media -- and his debut directorial feature effort, scripted and co-directed by his partner Shira Geffen, is a similarly mosaic composition.

Bernard Besserglik

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Expressing excitement at winning their Camera d'Or prize for best first feature, Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen called the experience "a dream." The directing duo also won the SACD prize in the festival's International Critics Week section. Playwright, theater director and actress Geffen summed up the excitement in Cannes Sunday, "It's like a dream...like in a movie."

Photo by Eugene Hernandez/indieWIRE

"הארץ" • "ידיעות" • "מעריב"

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The movie Meduzot ( מדוזות / Les Méduses / Jellyfish) has won the following awards:

• SACD Award
• Young Critics Award

Keret and Geffen Shooting "Jellyfish" [high resolution]

French authors' rights group the SACD, meanwhile, gave their prize for best director to Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen for their Israeli-French co-production "Jellyfish." Keret and Geffen were chosen by an elite jury composed of Bertrand Van Effenterre, Laurent Heynemann, Bertrand Tavernier and Claude Miller.

"Jellyfish" also proved a favorite among French youth, as the film picked up TV5Monde's "(Very) Young Critic Award" for best film. 36 students voted on the prize, which awards €4,500 ($6,052) to the winner for advertising and film promotion.

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"Surreal Israel" - (Rhys blakely / Time Magazine)

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• Telling people you’re a computer genius
• Faking an asthma attack
• Complimenting old, fat ladies

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