Docaviv 2025: Tel Aviv Film Festival Navigates Bans and Boycotts
TEL AVIV — As the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza dragged into its twentieth month, even a film festival felt like a front line. As I witnessed last month in Tel Aviv, the international film festival commonly known as Docaviv wasn’t just for the showcasing of documentaries—it became a stage for a cultural standoff. On the domestic side: filmmakers navigating state pressure, shrinking public spaces and a government that sees dissent as a threat. Internationally: boycott calls, distribution hurdles and a creeping sense that no one wants to hear you, no matter what you say.
This year’s festival poster—a dove clutching a band-aid—was the first clue of a community in distress that hoped for healing.
At Docaviv 2025 they said it anyway—at personal risk and under intensifying scrutiny. Several filmmakers described long debates over whether it was even safe to show their work. The atmosphere was charged not only by hostile domestic politics but by a wave of international hesitation. Even curators who once championed critical Israeli films have begun to distance themselves, wary of being seen as complicit with the war in Gaza, no matter the content.
I arrived in Tel Aviv two days late—missing the festival’s opening night premiere—after Houthi missile attacks temporarily shut down Ben Gurion Airport. During my shortened stay, I managed to take in a handful of films at Docaviv: Torn, Know Hope, The First Lady, and The Smugglers. Each was distinct in tone and subject, but all spoke to the tension between containment and permission in a 77-year-old democracy locked in a constant struggle—externally with its enemies, and internally over its identity.
Since its founding in 1999, Docaviv has always convened at Tel Aviv’s Cinematheque—roughly five blocks from Kaplan Street and Hostage Square, known as Democracy Square when it was ground-zero for protests against the government’s judicial overhaul attempts and since as the site of protest over its handling of the hostage crisis and the war in Gaza.
Traditionally, Docaviv has been a space where Israeli documentary filmmakers premiere their work for a domestic audience—often before those films travel to international festivals or air on local cable television. It’s also been a destination for documentary lovers to discover international titles, with foreign directors frequently presenting their work in person.
But this year, that spirit of exchange was harder to sustain. Some international filmmakers declined invitations due to safety concerns, while others—especially those whose work centers on oppressed or marginalized communities—chose not to participate, citing discomfort with being associated with Israeli institutions during wartime. The result was a noticeable narrowing of the global conversation that has long been central to Docaviv’s identity.
This year’s festival poster—a dove clutching a band-aid—was the first clue of a community in distress that hoped for healing. Designed by street artist Dede, the image hints at wounded hope. It became a symbol of both the fragility and urgency hanging over this year’s event.
TORN
Dede is also featured in Torn, which documents the fury unleashed by the “KIDNAPPED” posters plastered across New York City in the weeks after October 7. He created the poster campaign along with his creative partner Nitzan Mintz and fellow Israeli artist Tal Huber.
“You’re not advertising a banana,” Nimrod Shapira, the filmmaker behind Torn, told me. “You’re confronting someone with a child’s face, and asking them to care.” Some saw the posters as a display of solidarity. Others as a provocation. Street arguments turned into ideological brawls. Posters were torn down, replaced, defaced, defended.
Shapira made Torn on his own terms. “Some festivals are nervous,” he said. “That’s why I made it independently—to avoid any kind of censorship.” As an Israeli-American filmmaker, Shapira felt it was important not to pursue state funding. “It would have branded Torn as an ‘Israeli film,’ which I believed could limit both its reach and how it was received internationally.” Since December 2022, Miki Zohar, Israel’s minister of culture and sport and a member of Likud, has actively reshaped cultural policy, withdrawing state funding from films he labels “anti-Israel” or otherwise deemed harmful to Israel’s image and to the IDF.
In March 2025, Zohar openly condemned the Oscar-winning Palestinian-Israeli feature No Other Land as “demagoguery,” urging publicly funded cinemas to boycott its screenings.
“The minister is changing the rules,” Shapira added. “Colleagues who receive government funding are struggling to distribute their films. Some festivals avoid these films. That’s a loss. Israeli documentaries are among the best in the world.” These artists are brave and critical to fighting attempts to narrow the cultural conversation, he says. “Silencing them is a mistake.”
THE FIRST LADY
One of this year’s most intimate and emotionally layered films was The First Lady, which centers on Efrat Tilma—one of Israel’s first transgender women and the first transgender volunteer with the Israeli police. Directed by Udi Nir and Sagi Bornstein, the documentary is not a provocation but a measured insistence on visibility—on Tilma’s terms.
“When we began, we thought we were telling a story about survival in the past tense,” Nir told me, referring to the fact that for much of Tilma’s life, simply existing meant enduring police harassment, medical discrimination, and societal invisibility. “But then [in November 2022] this government came in, and their very first act was to attack the LGBT community. Efrat turned to us and said, ‘They’re starting with us. And they’ll end by dragging the country into war.’” Nir says she was right, not in the sense of an external conflict but about internal collapse, including the assumption among many Israelis that the new government would ramp up settlement expansion in the West Bank and deepen the marginalization of Arab citizens. “The film stopped being nostalgic,” Nir said. “It became urgent.”
Selected for CoPro’s 2025 Screening Room—a platform that helps Israeli documentaries reach international audiences—The First Lady avoids sentimentality. It explores the intersections of identity, policing, gender and political volatility in Israel, tracing how Tilma navigated an institution that had once brutalized her.
Efrat Tilma. Credit: Udi Nir
Tilma spent years volunteering with the police—handling emergency calls and leading diversity training, helping officers better understand and serve Israel’s LGBTQ community. That changed when Itamar Ben-Gvir became minister of national security in late 2022; under his leadership, the police grew more aggressive. Tilma left but not quietly, continuing to speak out—publicly and forcefully—against the direction the police were taking. For her, the institution she had worked so hard to humanize was being turned into a tool of political intimidation.
“We can’t judge her role in the police from our perspective,” said Nir. “We need to see it through her eyes as someone who suffered at the hands of the police and came back to face her greatest fear and make it a safer place for her and others from the trans community. We need to hold the contradictions and complexities, not oversimplify everything.”
Tilma’s journey—marked by institutional violence, profound loneliness and moments of public recognition—unfolds with candor and flashes of humor. At 75, she remains both fragile and fearless. “Efrat didn’t want to be simplified into a symbol,” Nir said. “She’s not just heroic or tragic. She’s human.”
The film’s Tel Aviv premiere ended in a long standing ovation. “To see her up on stage, commanding the room after everything she’s endured—it was exhilarating,” Nir said. “That night, she wasn’t surviving. She was seen.”
Efrat Tilma at the screening of “The First Lady.” Credit: Guy Yechiely
For Libby Lenkinski, who helped fund The First Lady through the New Israel Fund’s initiative Albi—a creative lab supporting socially engaged Israeli and Palestinian artists—that moment crystallized everything. “These films don’t hand out easy answers,” she told me. “They hold up a mirror. And that’s where the real work of civil society begins.” Albi supported three other festival entries: Know Hope, The Smugglers and Holding Liat, which all take very different paths to political urgency.
KNOW HOPE
Addam Yekutieli—who works under the name Know Hope—is a Tel Aviv–based graffiti and tattoo artist living with a chronic autoimmune condition. Over the past decade, he’s asked people in places as varied as Tel Aviv, the West Bank, and Brooklyn to share something deeply personal—a fear, a memory, a scar, a regret. Sometimes those words come in letters. Other times they’re jotted on scraps of paper or spoken in passing. He tattoos fragments of those sentences onto strangers and sketches their scars.
“I spend my days trying to document human rights violations for Israeli audiences. This film did it better than anything I’ve made—with no statistics, no horror footage. Just pain.”
His artwork—on skin and on walls—turns private scarring into social metaphor. A recurring figure in his street art is a plain, bowed human face—genderless and expressionless—painted across walls in cities on both sides of the Green Line. It doesn’t shout. It lingers. The repetition isn’t decorative; it invites concern, even in spaces where concern is often suppressed.
The film follows Yekutieli at work—listening, tattooing, sketching—as he moves between neighborhoods and encounters. The screen never shows images of Gaza, but the conflict hangs over the film like smoke. In one of its final scenes, Yekutieli walks past a Tel Aviv construction site where the word “Revenge” has been spray-painted in blue across a corrugated aluminum fence. He stops, pulls out red spray paint from his backpack, and adds a second line: “will never bring back the dead.” It’s a quiet response, delivered without spectacle.
Know Hope, directed by Omer Shamir, received Best Israeli Film at Docaviv 2025, a recognition by peer judges for its understated power and emotional precision.
After a screening, a researcher from B’Tselem told Libby Lenkinski of the Albi initiative: “I spend my days trying to document human rights violations for Israeli audiences. This film did it better than anything I’ve made—with no statistics, no horror footage. Just pain.”
THE SMUGGLERS
This film begins with a phone call: Tony Copti’s uncle, Michel George El-Raheb, needed help saving Yafa Café, his Arabic bookstore‑café in Jaffa. What started as a family effort to restock empty shelves quickly turned into something larger. Tony and Michel end up buying and smuggling books from places as varied as Nazareth, Gaza and Cairo’s massive international book fair—retracing a literary trail scattered, censored or erased after 1948.
“Arabic has been erased from cultural life in Israel,” co-director Yaniv Berman told me. What they uncovered confirmed that loss. Thousands of books taken from Palestinian homes during the Nakba remain locked in Israel’s National Library, labeled under the bureaucratic euphemism “Absentee Property.” “The National Library does good preservation work,” Berman added. “But those books—taken by soldiers—don’t belong to the state. They were looted.”
Getting The Smugglers into the Israeli competition came with its own complications. Some Palestinian participants were hesitant to appear in a film partially backed by Makan, Israel’s Arabic-language public broadcaster. While Makan broadcasts in Arabic, it’s part of the Israeli state media system—making collaboration feel fraught for those who view the state as systematically marginalizing their culture.
Copti and Berman’s film blends humor with bitterness. It traces one family’s intergenerational mission to recover lost books—verifying titles, restocking shelves, and rebuilding a space for Arabic readers in Jaffa. As the city becomes increasingly distant from its Arabic-majority past through waves of Israeli-led gentrification, the effort reflects broader political and cultural shifts among Palestinian citizens of Israel.
HOLDING LIAT
“Holding Liat” screening at Docaviv 2025. Courtesy of Docaviv
Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat captures a particular rupture—not through scenes of captivity, but through the long shadow it casts.
The film follows the Beinin‑Atzili family with unflinching intimacy after Liat Beinin Atzili was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7. Liat’s husband, Aviv Atzili, died in the attack, a fact the film only confirms in the tense moments just before Hamas hands her over to the Red Cross and she is transferred to a hospital in Israel.
But the film isn’t about her captivity—there are no scenes filmed in Gaza. Instead, it remains inside the spaces—both in Israel and in the United States—shaped by her absence, charting the ideological tremors within the family as they endure her 54 days in captivity.
Her father Yehuda, a peace activist, calls for negotiation. Her sister Tal, who left Israel years ago and now works in Portland, OR, as a certified personal trainer, takes a more guarded approach. During the family’s meetings with American lawmakers advocating for the hostages’ release, Tal urges Yehuda not to bring up his support for a two-state solution, worried it might alienate allies in Washington. Yehuda’s brother Joel, a Stanford historian, joins Palestine solidarity events. Their debates aren’t just political—they’re existential.
Tal, who left Israel years ago and now works in Portland, OR, as a certified personal trainer, takes a more guarded approach. During the family’s meetings with American lawmakers advocating for the hostages’ release, Tal urges her grandfather Yehuda not to bring up his support for a two-state solution, worried it might alienate allies in Washington.
Liat herself doesn’t appear until nearly an hour into the 93-minute film—arriving at the pivotal moment of handover to the Red Cross. And when she does speak, having returned to her job as a social studies teacher guiding students through Yad Vashem, she delivers a single line that fractures the frame: “I saw what happens beyond the fence. And I can’t look at it the same.”
That line lands just as polling data from earlier this year revealed that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support expulsion of Gazans—a result that erodes the moral middle Liat’s father, Yehuda Beinin, was striving to uphold.
Inside Docaviv’s screening halls, conversations about empathy and coexistence persist. Outside, protests demand a hostage deal. And in the wider public, a different current—not negotiation but removal—is gaining force. Dorit Inbar, director of the New Fund for Cinema and Television (NFCT), speaks bluntly: “Documentary filmmakers are now the front line. They’re defending democracy with their cameras.”
She doesn’t hide her frustration with the current political climate. “We’re suspected of being traitors anyway. They hate us,” she says, referring to supporters of the right-wing government. “They claim we only support films against them—even though they admit they don’t watch Israeli films.” Even before the current government, she noted, the backlash was real. “Over a decade ago, we supported Five Broken Cameras, which was nominated for an Oscar. The same happened with Waltz with Bashir. People said, ‘Don’t air our dirty laundry.’ But those films did more for Israel’s image abroad than any official campaign.”
NFCT-supported titles at Docaviv 2025 include Return, about a woman confronting the ultra-Orthodox world she left behind; Out at Six, which follows queer Israelis navigating identity and visibility; and My Bee Family, a lyrical portrait of caregiving and mental health in a mixed Jewish-Arab household.
The tension—between visibility and erasure, between protest and permission—was palpable across the films I saw and the conversations they sparked. In a year when even screening a film felt like an act of defiance, the festival held its ground. For one week in May, those stories held space—in post-film discussions, in the quiet before each Q&A, in the charged stillness of the Cinematheque.
As Yaniv Berman, co-director of The Smugglers, put it: “Filmmakers around the world boycotted the festival this year. But for us, showing our film is the mission. If no one sees it, we’ve lost the fight.”
Opening image: Docaviv 2025 stage; photo courtesy of Docaviv