Director Hilla Medalia and Producer John Priddy were on hand at the University of Toronto to kick off the inagrual Windrider at Wycliffe in Toronto.
The opening night crowd of over 225 lingered for a thoughtful and provocative Q&A session with Hilla and John. Imago sponsored a reception afterwards, which allowed the conversation to continue.
SIUC Graduate Wins Major Filmmaking Honors
By Pete Rosenbery
CARBONDALE, Ill. - Southern Illinois University Carbondale graduate Hilla Medalia, already an award-winning filmmaker, continues to earn national and international recognition.
Medalia's documentary, "To Die in Jerusalem," captured honors in both the United States and France this week.
Hilla Medalia's thought provoking film was among the thirty-five recipients of the 67th Annual Peabody Awards that were announced by the University of Georgia`s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The winners, chosen by the Peabody board as the best in electronic media for 2007, were named in a ceremony in the Peabody Gallery on the UGA campus.
The Peabody Board is a 16-member group, comprised of television critics, broadcast and cable industry executives and experts in culture and the arts, that judges the entries. Selection is made by the board following review by special screening committees of University of Georgia faculty, students and staff.
The cover of Newsweek framed the story starkly: side-by-side pictures of Ayat al-Akhras, an 18-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber, and 17-year-old Rachel Levy, killed by the bomb that Ms. Akhras detonated on March 29, 2002, at a Jerusalem supermarket. The two looked as if they could have been sisters and should have been living the lives of carefree teenagers, instead of becoming tragic symbols of the intractable Middle East conflict.
HBO's documentary president, Sheila Nevins, haunted by the cover, dispatched two established American producers (she declined to name them in an interview) to begin work on a film. They weren't able to make inroads with Ms. Akhras's family, and the project was dropped.
But HBO got its film anyway, from a first-time Israeli feature-filmmaker, Hilla Medalia, who saw the same magazine cover, had the same idea and succeeded where the others had failed. Her film, "To Die in Jerusalem," will be shown on HBO beginning on Nov. 1; it will also open the Paley Center for Media's documentary festival tonight.
AVIGAIL LEVY (right) met with would-be suicide bombers in an attempt to understand her daughter's killer.
Death be not Proud by Nathan Burstein, Jerusalem Post (July 11, 2007)
The mothers of a suicide bomber and her Israeli victim go under the lens in 'To Die in Jerusalem,' a documentary which premiered Wednesday at the
Jerusalem Film Festival.
It was an attack that stood out even during the deadliest month of the second intifada. Rachel Levy, a high school student with big eyes and dark hair, was running an errand for her mother at a Jerusalem supermarket when another teenager, an engaged Palestinian girl named Ayat al-Akhras, pushed past the store's security guard and detonated an explosive device strapped to her chest, killing herself, the guard and Levy. Levy's head remained intact, but forensic pathologists struggled to figure out which of the other body parts belonged to whom.
More than five years later, the gruesome bloodletting of that rainy afternoon serves as the starting point of To Die in Jerusalem, a documentary premiering Wednesday evening at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
