Ra'anan Alexandrowicz

Ra'anan Alexandrowicz ‎, was born August 29, 1969 in the city of Jerusalem in Israel/Palestine. He is a director, screenwriter and editor. Ra’anan is known for his recent film the The Viewing Booth (2019) which premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival and for the documentary The Law in These Parts (2011), for which received the Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival, a Peabody award, and numerous other prizes. His earlier documentaries, The Inner Tour (2001) and Martin (1999), were shown in the Berlin Film Festival's Forum for Young Cinema, and MoMA's New Directors / New Films series. Alexandrowicz's single fiction feature, James' Journey to Jerusalem (2003), premiered in Cannes Directors' Fortnight and at the Toronto International Film Festival and received several international awards.

Studying at the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel film school in the mid 1990’s Alexandrowicz focused on fiction filmmaking, but as he was touring festivals with his diploma work an accidental encounter shifted his cinematic path towards documentary.  Visiting the Dachau concentration camp site with two other film students Ra’anan met Polish native Martin Zeidenstadt, who had survived the concentration camp himself and remained to live in the town of Dachau for the rest of his life. With simple equipment and a small crew of volunteers Alexandrowicz filmed Zeidenstadt for a few days in what turned out to be a turbulent, unexpected encounter between the two. In the two and a half years that followed, with makeshift editing equipment and no funding, Ra’anan searched for a path through the footage he filmed in Dachau. The result was Ra’anan’s first documentary, Martin (1999) explores the discrepancy between memory and commemoration and the disparity between first generation and third generation Holocaust survivors. The film premiered in the Jerusalem Film Festival, where it won the Wolgin Prize for best documentary, later on playing in the Berlinale, and in New Directors/New Films NYC. A copy of the film is part of the MOMA permanent collection.

Alexandrowicz’s next documentary The Inner Tour (2001)  portrays the story of a group of Palestinians, who join a three day sight-seeing bus tour through the state of Israel.  Filmed just a few months before the out-break of the second Palestinian Intifada and intimately embedded in this group of tourists-in-their homeland the film presented its viewers with a rare documentation of the deepest roots for the painful Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Inner Tour was screened in dozens of festivals around the world (Berlin Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/ New Films, Vancouver International FF (where it received the best documentary award) Hot Docs and IDFA. The film also aired on several television channels (Sundance Channel, Arte, BBC).

Following The Inner Tour Ra’anan wrote and directed the full-length feature film James' Journey to Jerusalem (2003) that premiered in Cannes' 'Directors’ Fortnight' and at the Toronto International Film Festival and received several international awards. A dark comedy combining social commentary and modern fable, the film follows the adventures James, a devout wide-eyed young man from an imagined South African village attempting a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The film filters an astute exploration of the economic, moral and spiritual hypocrisies of Western society through an evocative portrait of modern Israel's cultural and generational divisions.

In his next film The Law in These Parts (2011), Alexandrowicz set out to expose the existence of a parallel legal system in Israel, one that applies only to Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation since 1967. The film challenges one of Israel’s basic dichotomies - can a democracy impose a prolonged military occupation on another people while retaining its core democratic values. The Law in these parts received the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival as well as a special Jury prize at Hot Docs and Full Frame documentary Film Festivals. In 2013 following the film’s broadcast on PBS Alexandrowicz received the Peabody award. In Israel, The Law in These Parts won Best Documentary in the Jerusalem Film Festival, pronounced best film by the Israeli Documentary Forum. The film was broadcasted on multiple channels as well as screened in various educational settings engaging lawyers; teachers; scholars public and many others.

It was during this time, though, that Alexandrowicz himself began to question about the nature of documentary work that aspires to change reality. His book chapter 50 Years of Documentation (2018) is a case study analysis of the documentation of the post 1967 Israeli Occupation based on an extensive archive research. The questions Ra’anan encountered while thinking of the documentation were what led him to make The Viewing Booth (2019) and to write the related essay Maia and the Boundaries of the Frame (2020)

The Viewing Booth is an in-depth study of how a pro-Israeli young American viewer sees images of abuse of Palestinian rights. The film presents its viewers with a mirror reflecting the very act of viewing. Dubbed “Minimalist in its approach yet far reaching in its consequences” The Viewing Booth is a case study film transcends beyond the images of Israel and Palestine and presents multi-layered, puzzling, and insightful testimony of the psychology of viewing in the digital era. The Viewing booth premiered in the 2020 Berlinale, played dozens of international film festival and had limited theatrical releases in NYC and London.