45. Will Filmmaker Yair Qedar Generate More Ideas?
Yair Qedar, whose film The Last Chapter of A.B. Yehoshua is featured in the JCC’s 2022 Other Israel Film Festival, talks to The Lambert Center’s Jason Blitman about the creation of this rare and striking look into the life of one of Israel’s most beloved writers. Qedar also shares his journey to becoming a filmmaker and influences on his work. Yair Qedar is a filmmaker and a LGBTQIA+ activist. His academic training on 20th-century Hebrew literature propelled him into The Hebrews—a documentary project on the Hebrew and Jewish literary canon, centered on filmic portraits of Hebrew writers from the 17th century to recent days. Sixteen feature-length documentary films have been made in the project so far, premiering in film festivals, airing on Israeli TV, and screened in hundreds of cinemas around the world. From 2015 to 2017, he co-directed and produced, with the actor Ilan Peled, the documentary miniseries Vanished, about the disappearance of women artists in Israeli culture. The film Lilyanin won first prize in the Haifa film festival in 2016. Qedar is also the initiator of various media projects in Israel, in the fields of the LGBT community such as the first LGBT newspaper Hazman HaVarod.