The Hidden Fountain – The World of Miriam Chalfi

Few know that Raquel Chalfi, one of Israel’s most outstanding modern poets, is also a founding figure of the nation’s avant-garde cinema. In fact, when she started in the late 1960s, Chalfi was more or less on her own in that area, and eyed with suspicious curiosity by an industry-fixated establishment. Over the decades, usually on her own and invariably taking many years over each work, she created some of the most unusual films ever made in Israel: eerie surrealist feminist phantasmagorias, simultaneously seductive and dangerous.

At first glance, her first feature documentary The Hidden Fountain is unlike any of these, being a portrait of her famed yet reclusive mother, sculptor Miriam Chalfi. It took Raquel more than a quarter century of persuasion, seduction and insistence until Miriam felt able to reveal something of herself in front of the camera. In the process, Chalfi reveals a lot of herself as well.

Also see Talk: The Tyger Burns. 

Trailer

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