The most interesting thing about this movie is what it says about the changing relationship between film and television. It's becoming commonplace to hear actors, writers and directors claiming that TV is now the place to be for powerful drama with narrative scope and rounded characters.
Retired spymasters, like retired diplomats, break their career reticence with particular relish, what they've known for so long in inverse proportion to what they can say. Dror Moreh’s remarkable interviews with the last six heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, shed light on strategies and tactics they were required to keep in the shadows in professional life. He focuses on actions among the colonised people of the Occupied Territories since Israel’s victory in 1967’s Six Day War, which made Shin Bet arguably more important than Mossad’s more famed, external spies.
Five male Filipinos in Tel Aviv live double lives. By day, they care for dying Orthodox Jews; by night, they are a drag act, the Paper Dolls. Based on real life, this play tells an incredible story that must be heard. Unfortunately, this production is not necessarily the one to tell it.
Orchestral volcanoes were erupting all over Europe around the year 1915. It was courageous enough to make a mountain chain out of three of them in a single concert. I was less prepared for the white-heat focus applied by that stalwart Dane Thomas Dausgaard, and completely flummoxed when he and Jian Wang, a cellist with the biggest yet most streamlined sound I’ve ever heard, made total sense of the only overblown monster on the programme, Bloch’s "Hebraic Rhapsody" Schelomo.
Stubbled, chubby and aged beyond his 34 years, Yossi, the eponymous hero of Israeli director Eytan Fox’s film played by Ohad Knoller, has a hang-dog loneliness to him that stands out a mile away. He may be a qualifying cardiologist, but his own heart seems stuck at the glacier stage.
Batsheva Dance Company is reaching its half-century, which makes it, as one of the world’s leading dance brands, not quite as old – or as young – as Israel, but Martha Graham helped launch it several years before the 1967 Six Day War. An international mix, it is in fact two companies, the senior one and the Ensemble, currently touring Britain and made up of youngsters who might or might not graduate to the main, Tel Aviv-based troupe. Ohad Naharin has been in charge since 1990, which was also when the junior fraction was created.
A story of six years of conflict in the West Bank set against more timeless details of life in the Palestinian town of Bil’in, 5 Broken Cameras brings the reality of resistance to the expansion of Israeli settlements – a conflict between unarmed locals and the Israeli army with its modern armaments - to the viewer in a far fuller way than we see in news reports.
Reviewing the Buxton Festival production of Handel’s Jephtha on theartsdesk a couple of months ago, Philip Radcliffe complained that the director, Frederic Wake-Walker, had done too little to justify the staging of this, the composer’s last oratorio: had made it, that is, too static and unstagey. I wonder what Radcliffe would say about Katie Mitchell’s production for Welsh National Opera, revived this weekend by Robin Tebbutt, and a classic case of a director’s reluctance to allow an essentially statuesque, slow-moving work its natural space and pace.
In the cool, dim, municipal modernist interior of Hornsey Town Hall you’re confronted with a neon sign: And Europe Will be Stunned. It's the title of the trilogy of films at the heart of this Artangel-commissioned show by Israel-born Yael Bartana. The films are split in location around the building in an exhibition which includes neon slogans and posters which can be taken away, bearing manifestos in different languages.
This is, as you may have heard, the Israeli TV series which provided the inspiration for Homeland, smartly snapped up by Sky Arts to plug the gap left by the latter after last weekend's finale. And guess what - it may be even better than its Hollywood spin-off.