Udi Aloni

Aloni was born and raised in Israel and is one of Shulamit Aloni’s three sons.[5][4] His mother served as Israel’s education minister.[4]

His artistic experience included visual art, writing, visual advertising in New York, and documentary filmmaking, all of which he credited with providing tools for directing.[6] He also recalled working for years as an usher at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, where he was able to watch about four films a day.[6]

Local Angel, a 70-minute documentary first shown in 2002, follows Aloni as an Israeli artist living in New York on a personal journey after the September 11 attacks and amid escalating violence in the Middle East.[7] With the United States and Israel listed as its countries of origin, the film explores the idea of holiness and encounters with another national narrative.[7] It includes a visit to Shulamit Aloni at a peace demonstration, a journey with her to Ramallah to meet Yasser Arafat, and conversations with Jewish and Palestinian thinkers and poets.[7]

Aloni’s writing also addresses Jewish and Palestinian identity and binationalism.[8] His 2013 book is titled What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters.[8] In discussing Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, he examined labels including “Israeli Arab,” “Israeli,” and “Palestinian Jew,” relating naming to presence, absence, and what he called the “trauma of absence.”[8] He used the phrase “an aesthetic of the present-absent subject” for Suleiman’s rendering of the “Israeli Arab” subject.[8]

Aloni’s 2006 narrative film Forgiveness (Mechilot) is based on his book Gilgul Mechilot.[2] An Israeli-American co-production, it stars Itai Tiran, Moni Moshonov, Clara Khoury, and Makram Khoury.[2] Aloni said he developed the Hebrew book and the film simultaneously in different modes, working on the film with Paul Hund and receiving guidance from screenwriter-director Henry Bean.[6]

The story follows a young American Jew who joins the Israel Defense Forces, kills a Palestinian girl during his service, and is subsequently admitted to a psychiatric institution.[2] The film places the institution, which mainly treats Holocaust survivors, on the ruins of Deir Yassin and incorporates the killing of the village’s residents during the War of Independence into its narrative.[9] Ghosts of the village communicate with the protagonist through a Holocaust-survivor patient, while his search for love and redemption takes him between Israel and New York.[2][9]

Aloni developed the survivor character with Moshonov, deliberately choosing a comic actor for a tragic role.[6] He described the character as existing “between worlds,” neither dead nor alive, and connected this choice to his interest in the tension between theatricality and cinematic realism.[6] He said he hoped the film could help open the cycle of hostility between Jews and Palestinians by approaching the land and its inhabitants through humility and forgiveness rather than violence.[6]

Forgiveness premiered in the Wolgin competition at the Jerusalem Film Festival and was selected for the Berlin, Toronto, and Karlovy Vary festivals.[9][2] At the 2006 Woodstock International Film Festival, it tied with Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding for the audience-favorite award.[2] It was also scheduled to close the Jewish Book Fair in London, accompanied by a discussion featuring Judith Butler.[9]

Aloni recalled that after a Woodstock screening, a former Israeli audience member challenged him by asking whether he had been to Auschwitz.[2] A Holocaust survivor nearby then said the film had touched her deeply; Aloni recalled, “That was the moment I started crying.”[2] He contrasted the warm reception with the arguments and controversy to which he had become accustomed around his work.[2]

The 2013 film Art/Violence was co-directed by Aloni and Palestinian actresses B’Toul Taleb and Miriam Abu Khaled.[10] It deals with the aftermath of the 2011 murder of Palestinian-Israeli theater director Juliano Mer-Khamis.[10]

The film follows the staging of Alice, directed by Mer-Khamis before his death, and rehearsals for Waiting for Godot, which Aloni staged on the same theater stage afterward.[10] It also follows the actresses’ work on a modern Antigone, combining animation, archival material, and performance footage.[10] Its exploration of art as political liberation addresses resistance to Israeli occupation alongside patriarchal oppression within Palestinian society.[10] Art/Violence won the Berlin festival’s Cinema Fairbindet Prize.[11]

Aloni directed Junction 48 (2016), a narrative film loosely based on rapper Tamer Nafar’s life growing up in Lod.[1] Nafar co-wrote the screenplay and plays Karim, a young Arab man who works in debt enforcement while pursuing hip-hop and a relationship with political activist Manar.[1] The film follows Karim as he takes a public stand against the demolition of neighbors’ homes and confronts threats from local criminals and so-called family-honor violence.[1]

Aloni emphasized the importance of getting Lod’s everyday details right: he insisted on reshooting a scene involving maqluba and brought Nafar’s mother and her kitchen into the production to ensure its authenticity.[1]

Produced with German and American partners, the film received support from the Israeli Rabinovich Foundation and Gesher Film Fund; contemporary coverage noted that the Israeli foundations backing it received state funding.[3] It won the audience-selected best fiction feature award in the Berlin International Film Festival’s Panorama section in February 2016 and the best international film award at Tribeca in April.[3] Aloni dedicated the Tribeca award to actress Ronit Elkabetz and his friend Mer-Khamis.[3]

Aloni said he intended Junction 48 to promote shared life and love, and dedicated the film to his mother and to Abu Tamer, Nafar’s father.[3] He described the artist’s role in a properly functioning state as being “the opposition to the state and not a propaganda mouthpiece,” and said he considered investment in peace more important than investment in “war toys.”[3]

Aloni’s documentary Why Is We Americans centers on African American poet, playwright, and activist Amiri Baraka and the struggle for equality and against racism in 1960s Newark.[12] It also focuses on Baraka’s widow, Amina, and their son Ras, Newark’s mayor.[12] The film traces the Baraka family’s story against Newark’s history from the protests of 1967 onward.[13]

An Israeli premiere was scheduled for the 2022 Solidarity Human Rights Film Festival, where the title was listed as Why Are We Americans?.[13] The festival also scheduled a tribute to Aloni featuring Left, Local Angel, Kashmir: The Road to Freedom, and Art/Violence.[13]

Aloni’s work received recognition across documentary and narrative cinema: Forgiveness, Art/Violence, and Junction 48 each won international festival awards.[2][11][3] His films connect artistic creation with political action, from the theatrical performances in Art/Violence and the music of Junction 48 to the Baraka family’s literary and political life in Why Is We Americans.[12] His writing on Suleiman also became a subject of academic discussion in Fiona Wright’s 2014 essay on identity, naming, presence, and absence.[8]

In 2007, the planned opening of the Israeli Film Festival in Paris with Forgiveness prompted a dispute over alleged diplomatic pressure.[9] Festival spokesperson Emily Muati alleged that Israeli cultural attaché Anita Mazor had threatened a boycott or withdrawal of support and that the film had been characterized to her as anti-Israel; the Foreign Ministry said it would examine the complaint.[9] Aloni refused to withdraw the film while expressing discomfort at serving as a “fig leaf” for the festival.[9]

At the 2016 Berlinale, reports said Aloni criticized Israel’s government and urged German Chancellor Angela Merkel not to supply Israel with submarines.[3] Aloni said his remarks had been taken out of context, described Junction 48 as promoting shared life and love, and said the film came from love of the country and all its inhabitants.[3] Culture Minister Miri Regev criticized his remarks and argued that creators who undermined and defamed the state should not receive public funding.[3]

Aloni has opposed defining Israel as a Jewish state and rejected the two-state solution, advocating instead one country for Israeli Jews and Palestinians from Israel, the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — and Gaza.[5] He expressed that position as a desire to broaden the dream of a Jewish state into a shared future for Jews and Palestinians.[5]