Avi Nesher

Nesher was born in Ramat Gan in 1952 and grew up watching films in neighborhood cinemas.[1] His parents, whom he described as Holocaust survivors, came to Israel in 1948; his mother worked in the Foreign Ministry, and his father was a sociologist.[1] He later connected their experiences, and the silences surrounding those experiences, to his interest in the relationship between family identity and the past.[1]

Recalling his childhood in Ramat Gan during the 1960s, Nesher described himself as “one of those strange children who divided their time between the soccer field and the library.”[8] In his account, the city had no public libraries, so he frequented private lending libraries, including one operated by a Holocaust survivor named Bernd.[8] Readers could take home only one book at a time, and Nesher sometimes responded to that restriction by sitting in the library and reading a second book there.[8]

Bernd became an important literary mentor after catching Nesher searching a drawer of books that he had kept away from younger readers.[8] Rather than simply reprimanding him, Bernd offered other books addressing similar subjects, introducing him to writers including Boccaccio, D. H. Lawrence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.[8] Nesher remembered their conversations as an education in the possibilities of writing beyond the description of events and characters: they encouraged him to notice sentence structure, the sound of language, and the relationship between a story and the words used to tell it.[8]

As Nesher approached his bar mitzvah, his family moved to New York because his father had been sent there on a diplomatic mission.[9] He spent much of his adolescence there and also studied at Columbia University.[10][2] He returned to Israel at 18 and enlisted during the War of Attrition.[9] His military service began in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit; following an injury, he became an intelligence officer and was serving in that capacity when the Yom Kippur War began.[10]

Films shown at military outposts provided another form of education.[9] Nesher recalled repeatedly watching the same 16-millimeter prints and taking notes on their storytelling, camera work, editing, and music.[9] The repetition allowed him to study how individual elements contributed to the finished film, turning the limited selection available to soldiers into an informal course in filmmaking.[9]

The Yom Kippur War figured directly in Nesher’s account of how he became a filmmaker.[9] Two of his four close childhood friends were killed, and he recalled the grief and guilt that followed their deaths.[9] After the war, he began writing film criticism and developing ideas for short films.[9] A small government grant enabled him to make the black comedy The Living Dead (המת על החי); he later recalled that he had never seen a movie camera before undertaking it.[9]

His feature debut, The Band (הלהקה), also known in English as The Troupe, was released in April 1978.[3] A musical comedy-drama about an army entertainment troupe during the War of Attrition, it drew on a distinctly Israeli military and entertainment setting.[3] Its cast included Gidi Gov, Meir Suissa, and Gali Atari, and the film became an Israeli classic whose songs remained popular decades later.[5] The actors were given room to improvise, an aspect of the production recalled in a later retrospective.[3]

The Band retained a lasting place in Israeli popular culture, with its songs and ensemble performances remaining closely associated with the film.[3][5] Its combination of music, improvisation, and the social world of young soldiers established subjects that differed from those of Nesher’s later Hollywood genre work.[3]

Nesher followed his debut with Dizengoff 99 in 1979.[3] The film centers on three young people sharing an apartment in Tel Aviv after their army service, with their working lives and attempts to make a film forming part of the story.[3][11] Gidi Gov appeared in both of these early Nesher productions.[3] Together, The Band and Dizengoff 99 became enduring cultural touchstones, preserving recognizable settings and experiences of young Israeli life.[3]

Nesher subsequently turned from contemporary young people to the pre-state underground in Rage and Glory (זעם ותהילה, 1984).[5] Its story concerns a Lehi fighter and the struggle against British rule.[12] Nesher later explained that he wanted to bring the underground movements and their struggle into Israeli cinema.[12] His preparation included interviews with dozens of former Lehi members, among them then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.[12] He recalled Shamir telling him after the premiere, “Although we don’t agree politically, the film depicts us as we were.”[12]

After Rage and Glory, Nesher moved to Hollywood, where he directed thrillers, science-fiction films, and horror films.[1][5] He described Rage and Glory as a commercial failure in Israel despite what he regarded as strong international success, and recalled considering an end to his filmmaking career before receiving an invitation to direct for MGM.[1] The invitation opened a period of work in American genre cinema rather than the Israeli social and historical settings of his early features.[1]

After moving to Hollywood, Nesher wrote, produced, and directed films for companies including Disney, MGM, Columbia, and Fox.[2] His American work included Timebomb, Doppelganger, starring Drew Barrymore, and the independent film Taxman.[1][11] These productions formed the middle phase of a career later presented retrospectively as a movement from early Israeli filmmaking through Hollywood and back to Israel.[11]

His genre films received festival recognition in France.[2] Timebomb won first place at the Avoriaz science-fiction film festival, while Doppelganger, released two years later, brought Barrymore the festival’s best-actress award.[2]

Nesher returned to Israel in 2001.[5] His return was connected to his father’s death that year and to the questions of family and personal identity raised by the loss.[2] Those concerns informed Turn Left at the End of the World, which he co-wrote with Sarah Ezer and Ruby Porat-Shoval and released in 2004.[2] Nesher said that he wrote the film while processing his father’s death and was surprised by the size of the audience it reached.[3]

Set in a southern development town in the late 1960s, the film follows two teenage girls and their families: Sarah, a new immigrant from India, and Nicole, whose parents came from Morocco.[3] Sarah’s efforts to find her place among predominantly Moroccan neighbors provide a central perspective on immigration and community life.[5] The film won two Ophir Awards, drew a large domestic audience, and remained in cinemas for more than eight months.[3][2] It marked Nesher’s return to Israeli screens after his extended period of American filmmaking.[5][2]

In 2004, Nesher also made Oriental, identified in a later retrospective as his only documentary.[11] It combines footage of a Russian-born belly dancer working with Arab musicians in Israel with interviews featuring negotiators involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.[11] Its movement between performance and negotiation distinguishes it from the fictional immigrant-town setting of Turn Left at the End of the World, released in the same year.[11][2]

The Secrets (הסודות, 2007) follows religious girls studying at a seminary in Safed.[1] Ania Bukstein stars as Neomi Hess, a religious Jewish teenager attending a midrasha who begins to explore the secular world.[13] The film received critical acclaim and continued Nesher’s work with stories in which young people encounter social worlds beyond those familiar to them.[13]

His 2010 film Once I Was (פעם הייתי), also known as The Matchmaker, follows a 16-year-old boy and a Holocaust-survivor matchmaker during the summer of 1968.[1][5] The film brought Holocaust memory into a story organized around a younger protagonist and his relationship with an older survivor.[1] Adir Miller won the Ophir Award for Best Actor for his performance in the film.[14] Nesher followed it with The Wonders in 2013.[5]

Past Life (החטאים, 2016) was inspired by the family story of sisters Ella Milch-Sheriff and Shosh Avigal and their discovery of their father’s Holocaust diary.[1] Nesher said he initially resisted returning to Holocaust and second-generation subjects before agreeing to hear Milch-Sheriff’s account.[1] The story gave him another way to address the relationship between parents’ experiences and the identities of their children, a subject he associated with his own family history.[1]

The film was selected for the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival’s Contemporary World Cinema program, where its world premiere was planned.[14] Its story follows two ambitious and competitive sisters in 1977: a journalist who exposes scandals and a gifted but reserved musician, whose lives change amid that year’s political upheaval.[14]

Nesher’s next feature was The Other Story (2018).[5] Using the English title Another Story, a contemporary report said that it attracted 154,000 cinema viewers in 12 days.[14] Distributor Moshe Edery praised Nesher’s ability to combine strong reviews with substantial box-office success.[14] The film’s reception preceded the national lifetime achievement recognition that Nesher received later in 2018.[7]

Image of Victory (תמונת הניצחון, 2021) depicts the Battle of Nitzanim during Israel’s War of Independence through young people at Kibbutz Nitzanim and an Egyptian journalist embedded with Egyptian forces.[15] Nesher described his decision to use Israeli and Egyptian perspectives as a way of presenting “two conflicting narratives.”[15] The film’s research included the diaries of Mira Ben Ari, a young mother who operated radio communications and remained to fight after her husband and son left.[15]

The film combines the approaching armed confrontation with romantic relationships, friendships, and humor among its characters.[14] Its ending depicts the capture of Nitzanim by Egyptian forces and the surviving defenders being taken prisoner.[3] The production received 15 Ophir Award nominations and won three awards.[14][3]

Production involved a substantial reconstruction of the early statehood period in Beersheba.[14] Nesher said, “I think that since ‘The Blaumilch Canal’ they haven’t built such a large set in Israeli cinema.”[14] He also discussed additional costs imposed by COVID-era arrangements, including separate crew capsules, accommodation, makeup staffing, and longer shooting days.[14] The battle scenes nevertheless depended on limited physical resources: two tanks, one immobile and the other made of wood, were supplemented with green-screen work and practical effects.[3]

The film was Nesher’s first after the death of his 17-year-old son Ari in an accident in 2018.[5] Nesher said that making it brought home the human cost paid by young people on all sides of a conflict.[5] In discussing his inclusion of the Egyptian perspective, he said that the story could not be told without the other side and that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”[5]

The Monkey House followed in 2023.[5] Its screenplay was inspired by real events, with Nesher serving as both writer and director.[14] Its reported cast included Adir Miller, Shani Cohen, Yaniv Biton, Eran Zarhovich, and journalist Rina Matzliah; the project was described as Nesher’s fourth collaboration with Miller.[14] The film opened shortly before October 7, 2023, and sold more than 100,000 tickets before the war began and cinemas closed.[10]

Nesher later brought The Monkey House to survivors who had asked to see it.[10] He connected that experience to his consideration of a film about people’s lives and the changes surrounding October 7 rather than a direct reenactment of the attack.[10] His subsequent film, Our Loves (האהבות שלנו), follows seven interconnected characters whose already troubled relationships are upended by the Hamas-led October 7 attack on southern Israel.[6][16] Based on true events, it opened the Haifa International Film Festival in 2026 and received 12 Ophir Award nominations.[6][16]

Nesher has described music as the emotional core of a film and as a starting point for writing screenplays.[17] An enthusiastic, though by his own account not especially accomplished, jazz musician, he compared directing to guiding improvising musicians so that their individual contributions do not become cacophony.[17] This understanding of direction emphasizes the coordination of separate creative voices rather than the elimination of their differences.[17] The latitude given to actors on The Band provides an early example of improvisation within his filmmaking.[3]

His account of learning from repeatedly screened military films likewise placed storytelling alongside camera work, editing, and music.[9] Rather than treating these as separate attractions, he kept notes on each as part of his informal study of how a film worked.[9] His earlier conversations with Bernd had encouraged a comparable attention to the relationship between narrative and form in literature, including the rhythm and structure of sentences.[8]

That childhood literary relationship later resurfaced when Nesher received a proposal to adapt Erri De Luca’s The Mountain of the Lord (הר אדוני).[8] Nesher first read the novel in response to the proposal and recognized parallels between its child narrator, who would become a writer, its Holocaust-survivor mentor, and his own memories of Bernd’s library.[8] De Luca had long opposed a film adaptation but became interested in collaborating after seeing Turn Left at the End of the World.[8] For Nesher, the proposed project brought together his literary education and his later work as a filmmaker.[8]

Family history also shaped his selection of material.[1] He associated his interest in identity and the past with his parents’ Holocaust experiences, while his father’s death informed the writing of Turn Left at the End of the World.[1][3] Past Life emerged from another family’s encounter with its father’s Holocaust diary, despite Nesher’s initial reluctance to revisit the subject.[1] His later explanation of Image of Victory similarly connected the making of a film to personal bereavement and to an intensified awareness of the vulnerability of young people.[5]

In 2018, Nesher received the Ministry of Culture and Sport’s Film Art Prize Lifetime Achievement Prize.[6][7] The judging panel called him “one of the leaders of Israeli cinema for over four decades, from classic films to the biggest blockbusters of the last decade.”[7] The award recognized a career extending from the popular musical ensemble of The Band to the varied Israeli settings of his later films.[7][5]

In 2019, he was selected to light a ceremonial torch at Israel’s 71st Independence Day ceremony.[14] The selection committee described him as “one of the symbols of the film industry in Israel.”[14] The tribute was dedicated to Israeli film professionals and to families of organ donors, the latter connected to Ari Nesher’s death in a traffic accident and the donation of his organs.[14] In 2026, the Haifa International Film Festival awarded Nesher its lifetime achievement honor for cinematic excellence and contribution to Israeli culture.[6]

A Jerusalem Cinematheque retrospective in 2022 organized his career into three phases: Israeli films of the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood productions of the 1980s and 1990s, and the films made after his return to Israel in the early 2000s.[11] That structure brought his different production environments together within a single career survey, including the documentary Oriental alongside his fiction films.[11]

His work has also been used to teach Israeli history and society through cinema.[18] The Troupe appears in a course unit on transformations in Israeli culture alongside discussions of new pacifism, the “non-sucker” ethos, and the arrival of rock music.[18] Rage and Glory is used in a unit on the Mandate era, Jewish underground activism, and the Arab-Jewish conflict before statehood and after the Holocaust.[18] Turn Left at the End of the World appears in teaching about immigration from the Middle East and Asia, emigration to the United States, and social change in Israel.[18] It also appears in a course on the Jewish life cycle through Israeli film, while Oriental is included under the theme of conflict as an intercultural encounter.[19][20]

Nesher himself became the subject of the documentary Nesher, constructed from dozens of hours of interviews.[4] Its life narrative begins with the 1973 Yom Kippur War and ends on Sukkot in October 2023.[4] A screening in the 2024 Docu.Text festival program was scheduled to be followed by a conversation with the filmmakers and Nesher.[4]

Rage and Glory generated opposing political accusations over its representation of Lehi.[5] Critics on the left accused Nesher of glorifying the underground organization, while critics on the right accused him of using its depiction of pre-state Jewish terrorism to justify Palestinian terrorism.[5] Nesher’s own explanation emphasized his desire to bring the underground struggle against British rule to the screen, informed by interviews with former members.[12]

Image of Victory likewise engages competing interpretations of the War of Independence through its Israeli and Egyptian perspectives.[15] Nesher explicitly framed the film around “two conflicting narratives,” making that juxtaposition part of its dramatic design.[15] Its characters, narrative arrangement, and depiction of the battle should therefore be understood as elements of a researched dramatic film rather than as an independent historical account.[15]