Latest news with #Shoval
The Star
5 days ago
- General
- The Star
Chinese language proficiency competition held in Israel
JERUSALEM, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The 24th "Chinese Bridge" Chinese proficiency competition for Israeli university students concluded in Jerusalem on Thursday, featuring Chinese-language speeches and a variety of talent performances. Held under the theme "One World, One Family," the competition brought together eight students from several Israeli universities. Participants showcased their command of the Chinese language and their passion for Chinese culture through poetry recitations, calligraphy demonstrations, and performances of Chinese pop songs. Alon Shoval from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem won the contest, and will represent Israeli university students to compete in the annual international Chinese language contest to be held in China. In his speech, Shoval mentioned that he initially studied Chinese to improve his communication skills. "But as I dove deeper into the language, I realized that the true value of learning Chinese is not simply to say 'I can speak Chinese,' but to step beyond myself -- to connect with others on a deeper, emotional level," he said. At the event, Sun Chaoyang, minister counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Israel, said that the competition serves as an important platform for people-to-people exchange and mutual learning between civilizations. He expressed hope that the competition would help young Israelis gain a deeper understanding of the Chinese language and culture, further strengthen mutual understanding and friendship between the two peoples.
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Israeli director's 'Letter to David' film about hostage seeks to capture person behind the horror
By Hanna Rantala BERLIN (Reuters) - For Tom Shoval, making the film "A Letter to David" was a way to ensure that his friend David Cunio was not just a face on a kidnapped poster after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, during which over 250 hostages were taken to Gaza by militants. The material coming in the day of the attack, which left at least 1,200 people dead, was "uncensored, unfiltered, with no dignity, no way to look at perspective and to understand something - just horror, horror, horror," Shoval told Reuters. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. It was "this blast of images, of carnage and violence, graphic violence, that almost makes you blind," he said. "You can't really see the person. You just see the horror." In the film, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday, Shoval wanted to show that Cunio, who remains a hostage, was someone with motivations, dreams and nightmares. "I wanted to show that and release the person from this horror that was blinding us all," he said. What resulted was "A Letter to David," Shoval's deeply personal cinematic message to Cunio, who starred along with his twin brother in the director's first feature, 2013's "Youth." The film uses footage from "Youth" along with home video shot by the Cunios during the making of that film. That is contrasted against footage shot by Shoval in the Cunios' kibbutz in the weeks and months after the attack, showing how the tight-knit community was changed by it. "I felt that I have to talk to him somehow," said Shoval. "I'm a filmmaker and this is the only way I can approach it." In the intimate home video footage, the Cunio twins film their day-to-day lives at Kibbutz Nir Oz: wandering around an orange grove, pulling pranks from a rooftop, flirting with girls. "Watching that old footage, it was chilling," Shoval said. 'HE WILL COME BACK' The film, said Shoval, was a way to mourn the end of an era, but he does not mourn for David. "For me he's alive and he will come back. And the film is in a way a cry of hope for that," he said. Shoval hopes that seeing the film will let others get to know David and raise awareness of the hostages' hard conditions. "It's a matter of life and death," he said. The ups and downs in hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas have been "a roller coaster," said Shoval, but he does not want the fact that there are still hostages to feel normal. Palestinian militant groups have said that they will release three hostages seized from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Saturday, though Cunio was not among them. Hamas had earlier threatened not to proceed with the release of more hostages after it accused Israel of violating the terms of the ceasefire by blocking aid from entering Gaza. "It's worse that we will get used to the fact that there are hostages there and just live our lives," Shoval said. If the film awakens audiences even for a moment, to see that this is happening and important, "then I guess it's worth it."
Reuters
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Reuters
Israeli director's 'Letter to David' film about hostage seeks to capture person behind the horror
BERLIN, Feb 14 (Reuters) - For Tom Shoval, making the film "A Letter to David" was a way to ensure that his friend David Cunio was not just a face on a kidnapped poster after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, during which over 250 hostages were taken to Gaza by militants. The material coming in the day of the attack, which left at least 1,200 people dead, was "uncensored, unfiltered, with no dignity, no way to look at perspective and to understand something - just horror, horror, horror," Shoval told Reuters. It was "this blast of images, of carnage and violence, graphic violence, that almost makes you blind," he said. "You can't really see the person. You just see the horror." In the film, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday, Shoval wanted to show that Cunio, who remains a hostage, was someone with motivations, dreams and nightmares. "I wanted to show that and release the person from this horror that was blinding us all," he said. What resulted was "A Letter to David," Shoval's deeply personal cinematic message to Cunio, who starred along with his twin brother in the director's first feature, 2013's "Youth." The film uses footage from "Youth" along with home video shot by the Cunios during the making of that film. That is contrasted against footage shot by Shoval in the Cunios' kibbutz in the weeks and months after the attack, showing how the tight-knit community was changed by it. "I felt that I have to talk to him somehow," said Shoval. "I'm a filmmaker and this is the only way I can approach it." In the intimate home video footage, the Cunio twins film their day-to-day lives at Kibbutz Nir Oz: wandering around an orange grove, pulling pranks from a rooftop, flirting with girls. "Watching that old footage, it was chilling," Shoval said. 'HE WILL COME BACK' The film, said Shoval, was a way to mourn the end of an era, but he does not mourn for David. "For me he's alive and he will come back. And the film is in a way a cry of hope for that," he said. Shoval hopes that seeing the film will let others get to know David and raise awareness of the hostages' hard conditions. "It's a matter of life and death," he said. The ups and downs in hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas have been "a roller coaster," said Shoval, but he does not want the fact that there are still hostages to feel normal. Palestinian militant groups have said that they will release three hostages seized from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Saturday, though Cunio was not among them. Hamas had earlier threatened not to proceed with the release of more hostages after it accused Israel of violating the terms of the ceasefire by blocking aid from entering Gaza. "It's worse that we will get used to the fact that there are hostages there and just live our lives," Shoval said. If the film awakens audiences even for a moment, to see that this is happening and important, "then I guess it's worth it."
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tom Shoval & Nancy Spielberg Discuss Gaza Hostage Film ‘A Letter To David' & Why Berlinale Is Right Place For World Premiere
David Cunio and his twin brother Eitan were at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013 as the stars of Israeli director Tom Shoval's first feature Youth which world premiered to acclaim in Panorama. The pair, who hail from the Nir Oz Kibbutz in southern Israel, played brothers who kidnap a young woman using a military service-issued rifle in an ill-advised scheme to raise funds to pay off family debts. More from Deadline Thai Studio Night Edge Unveils Horror Pic 'Death Dial' Starring Actress Penpak Sirikul & Sanya Kunakorn - EFM Tilda Swinton Plans A Break From Acting & Addresses Berlin Attendance Despite Boycott Calls Berlin Film Festival 2025: All Of Deadline's Movie Reviews The story was pure fiction but the fraternal bond on the big screen was real. A decade later David Cunio was kidnapped in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack with his wife Sharon Aloni Cunio and twin daughters from their home in Nir Oz, where around 180 of the some 400 residents were either killed or abducted that day. His wife and children were released in November 2023, but close to 500 days later David Cunio has yet to be released, with the family clinging to the hope that he is still alive somewhere in Gaza. His younger brother Ariel was also abducted and is yet to be freed too. They are among 73 hostages still unaccounted for in Gaza, with Israeli intelligence suggesting that 38 are still alive, while 35 are presumed dead. Shoval is back in Berlin this year with his very personal film A Letter To David, capturing the essence of his kidnapped friend and the trauma of brother Eitan, wife Sharon and parents Silvia and Jose Luis Cunio. Mixing extracts from Youth; footage of the development and shooting of the film, and interviews with family members, the cinematic letter adds flesh and blood to the man now staring out of 'Bring Him Home' posters. The film is produced by Maya Fischer, Alona Refua and Roy Bareket at Jerusalem-based Green Productions, Shoval's long-time producers on Youth and second feature Shake Your Cares Away, and Nancy Spielberg under her Playmount Productions banner. Spielberg, whose EP credits include Aulcie and We Will Write Our History, connected with the production through friend Jake Paltrow, with whom Shoval co-wrote Adolf Eichmann trial drama June Zero. Deadline talked to Shoval and Spielberg about the film as it world premieres at the Berlinale. DEADLINE: A Letter To David TOM SHOVAL: After 7th October, I was in contact with Silvia Cunio. It was very chaotic. Nobody knew what to do and what was really happening. It was kind of fresh and overwhelmingly frightening. She was saying to me, 'Can you help us raise our voice so we will be heard, and people will know what is happening.' My immediate response was to tap into my cinema circuit, using the fact that David had been in my film… I felt helpless but I started thinking and went back to Youth. It occurred to me that a lot of elements in the film echoed what was happening. David and Eitan are the kidnappers and there's this hidden horror in the movie that we touched on, but we didn't know what we were touching on. The film has changed. I can't see it in the same way anymore. I went into the editing room and tried to make an essay and then I realized it had to be more, that I wanted to shout, and that I wanted to do it for David, and this became the basis of this cinematic letter, A Letter to I really wanted to show the film in the Berlinale. Of course, I feel a bit tense because the situation is so fragile, and people are so emotional. The film is very personal, but a lot of people will look at it through a very broad perspective. I know that there may be a clash but the film, even if it's personal, belongs in the cinema. We're closing some sort of a circle. Youth premiered in the Berlinale and David was here, getting all the attention. This is kind of closure and hopefully by doing this closure, we will get a brighter future and David here, with all the other hostages alive and well. SPIELBERG: We're all on shaky ground. One of the things that makes us all tremble is that the world is so divided, so polarized. If we can't get to a place where we can listen to each other, how are we ever going to heal? How are we ever going to move forward when everybody is fighting, screaming, without even bothering to listen? What I like about this film and what I'm hoping is that we do break it down to humanity and trying to understand what a person looks like and not a label. DEADLINE: SHOVAL: In the process of thinking about this film, I found a kind of a hidden treasure, a box with a lot of unedited material, intended for a kind of PR film showing the process of turning David and Eitan from non-actors to actors. We gave them cameras to capture their lives in the kibbutz. All of a sudden, I was transported back in time somehow and it became part of the film and part of the letter. DEADLINE: SHOVAL: I get chilled every time I see these moments. It was like we were dancing or playing. We didn't feel anything violent. It was an illusion. When you see it now, you see the violence, you can't escape it. And in my imagination, I'm asking myself where is David now? What is happening to him now. You imagine a lot of horrible stuff and you don't want it to be like that. The film is also looking back at what it is to do cinema, and this connection between cinema and reality. DEADLINE: SHOVAL: I was in constant conversation with the family the whole time because I didn't want to anything they did not want to do. They were on board from the start, also we had known one another for many years. I was very gentle with all of them. I was always saying, 'If at any given moment, you do not feel comfortable, just tell me and we'll stop, or do it another way.' DEADLINE SHOVAL: I knew from the beginning that I didn't want to do that. The moment we got these waves of violent and harsh footage we you couldn't see anything else. It makes you blind, and you lose the human perspective of what is happening. You had posters of people kidnapped and these condensed images of horror. I wanted to break out of this and show the person behind this tragedy, not some fragmented vision from surveillance cameras with images of the terrorists. DEADLINE: SPIELBERG: I was in Israel 7th October. It was the most frightening experiences of my life. As an American, what can I compare it to? 9/11, maybe but just because I live in New York and sort of close to the World Trade Center. In this case, I was told to lock myself in a safe room because nobody knew whether the terrorists were coming. It was a scary experience. From the minute it happened, all we did was watch all that footage, and unfortunately, it does have such a devastating effect. All the trauma gets repeated over and over again, and you're almost fuelling this fear and anxiety on a minute-by-minute basis. I do documentaries. I tell stories. I wanted to tell a 7th October story the same way that I've worked on Holocaust films. I think every story is important. Everything has to be documented, but I also didn't want to go down that route of the brutal footage that was out there. Jake Paltrow said you need to hear about Tom's project. It was the right answer for me. It was a way to take this down to the individual and to really focus on this incredible life and this wonderful person. We all have this innocence of when we were at the height of our lives, weddings and eating an orange in the orchard and goofing around with our friends and little do we know what is waiting down the road for us. Nobody imagines this is waiting in our wildest imaginations. DEADLINE: SPIELBERG: We're all very connected. The whole production team is wonderful. Roy and Maya and Alona, they're just all so collaborative. I wanted to be the non-Israeli set of eyes. I wanted to be the American audience, to be there to say. 'The rest of the world maybe doesn't know the Cunio family.' DEADLINE: SHOVAL: It's been a dilemma from the start but we want to keep him in existence, we don't want him to disappear. At a certain point, when there was no deal, people were just walking past the posters, it was becoming part of life, routine. I can't deal with that. I can't comprehend that. Me and the family want his voice to heard. Of course, we're very worried, but this is one of the tools we have. DEADLINE: SHOVAL: All I can say is that I believe we need to do everything we can until the last hostage is free and every one of them out of there, no matter what it takes what, this is the only way to go. DEADLINE: SHOVAL: No violence. I just want a deal to be made done, and as soon as possible. There is really no time. Best of Deadline 'Severance' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Land On Apple TV+? 'Captain America: Brave New World' Primer: What To Remember Ahead Of The First Marvel Film Of 2025 The 25 Highest-Grossing Animated Films Of All Time At The Box Office
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Berlin festival seeks to bury Gaza row with Israeli hostage film
The Berlin film festival premiered a documentary about an Israeli hostage held by Hamas on Friday as it seeks to move on from controversy over its stance on Gaza at last year's edition. "A Letter to David" by Israeli filmmaker Tom Shoval is a tribute to David Cunio, who was taken by Palestinian militant group Hamas from the Nir Oz kibbutz on October 7, 2023, and is still being held hostage in Gaza. Shoval had previously featured Cunio and his twin brother Eitan in his award-winning debut feature film "Youth", which premiered at the Berlinale in 2013. In the new film, screening in the festival's Special category, Shoval uses excerpts from "Youth" alongside unseen footage and interviews with Cunio's family members to create a tribute to his missing friend. They include David's twin brother Eitan, his mother, and his wife Sharon Cunio and twin daughters -- who were also captured by Hamas fighters on October 7 but released after 52 days. Shoval said he had decided to make the film because he did not want David to be perceived as just "a hostage you see on a poster". "He is also a real person. He was an actor at some point in his life, he has a family, he has a mother, he has a father. He exists not only as an image," Shoval told AFP. "It was very important to me to convey this, and also to show the pain that the family is going through." - 'Torn apart' - In the film, David's twin Eitan shows a tattoo of stars on his wrist -- which David also has -- as he talks about his brother, hunched over and smoking a cigarette. Eitan also takes the viewer on a tour of his and David's old homes in the kibbutz, giving a harrowing blow-by-blow account of what happened to them on October 7. For Eitan, being separated from his brother has been "like being torn apart" and he is "not the same person any more", Shoval said. The Berlinale was heavily criticised last year after several filmmakers were accused of making anti-Semitic remarks on stage at the closing awards ceremony. US filmmaker Ben Russell, wearing a Palestinian scarf, accused Israel of committing "genocide" in the Gaza Strip, while Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra said the Palestinian population was being "massacred" by Israel. Ahead of this year's festival, the Berlinale published guidelines on its website on freedom of expression, anti-Semitism and showing solidarity with the Palestinian cause. "We... stand by the right of our filmmakers to talk about the impulses behind their work and their experiences of the world. The Berlinale welcomes different points of view, even if this creates tension or controversy," they said. Tricia Tuttle, who took over as the new director of the Berlinale in April last year, said she was "surprised" about the backlash against the comments made last year, describing them as "free speech". - Red-carpet vigil - "I'm more upset that there wasn't a sort of place in the festival for people to feel empathy or hear empathy for the hostages too," she told AFP. "We didn't speak up for David Cunio last year and I feel like we really missed an opportunity. "While I want to be incredibly careful that we don't continue to silence voices that are expressing sorrow and solidarity and an urge for Palestinian statehood, I also want to make sure that we show that we care about people who we have a relationship with." At the opening of the Berlinale on Thursday, Tuttle joined a vigil for David Cunio on the red carpet. Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,211 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures. Militants also took 251 hostages, of whom 73 remain in Gaza, including at least 35 the Israeli military says are dead. Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 48,239 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory that the UN considers reliable. fec/sr/jxb
