The 3rd edition of the REPERTOIRE series, which invites filmmakers for in-depth discussions and screenings at the Volksbühne.

END OF THE WEST
Yotam Ben-David 
France | 2024 | 16' | FID 2024
Flash Competition

One evening, among decaying electric appliances, a man contemplates exile and fading traditions. His heart is in the east, while he himself is at the end of the west.

HAVE YOU SEEN THAT MAN?
Yotam Ben-David 
France, Romania | 2020 | 15' | FID 2021
Other Gems

A field at night. A man lying dead. Young boys staring at the corpse with eyes wide open, their torch glowing in the dusk. Night-time, a torch, a child’s eyes: such are Yotam Ben-David’s tools in his quest for the truth. In turns, a boy knocks on doors in the village and asks the women who open if they know that man. There are as many answers as there are women, as many narrative registers, as many alternative, successive or complementary truths. A mosaic of fates lying in wait for the villager: a historical anthropology of a village in black and flame.

Nathan Letoré

THUNDER FROM THE SEA
Yotam Ben-David
France | 2018 | 46' | FID 2018
Competition Premier film

Between night and day, the hills of a village in Israel. The young Dekel tries pulling himself together from a painful break-up. Within the imprecision of a natural backdrop dipped into the sweetness of the moon, he stumbles upon his friend Doron whose lit-up shoes spread light visible kilometres away. Along with two other boys, they are going to spend the night talking away: talk as much as possible, in a final attempt to give life back to what they share. For his first film, Yotam Ben-David is only playing scales: Dekel’s, Doron’s, Udi’s and Rona’s bodies are shot as close as possible to smiles and gestures of barely sketched out seduction, or seem to be so far away like thunder, like tiny bright lighthouses looking for comrades who had not seen each other for a long time. Seated around a circle, the four young men unveil a more secret composition whenever the camera captures them separately, highlighting their mental off-camera and the occasional side glances whose survival out of the frame we know nothing about. Savory drinks and narghile carry the weight of childhood and adult age stories about tough times, of fights and life as homosexuals. When the voices are silent for just a moment, we hear coyotes cry out: an indirect denunciation and evidence that, though words are still flowing, something between the boys is now dissolved. A lucid film, Thunder over Sea does not surrender and keeps blowing, for a fleeting moment, on the narghile’s brand to keep its flame burning.

VP

Date : 16.04.2025 at 8:00 pm
Lieu : Volksbühne, Berlin
In the presence of Yotam Ben-David