Five short films in which production design creates a new world. In today’s Israel, where everything is painted in black or white, the films open up a colorful and radical space for boundary-breaking cinematic art direction.

Sometimes the pill needs a sugar coating. “Art at Artport” presents five short films in which production design creates a world, both internal and external. An aesthetic of surrealism and the grotesque dismantles the familiar and puts it back together anew: a telephone line connecting people who do not listen to one another; an invitation to a feast made from the protagonist’s body parts; an intimate attempt to reconstruct a memory through everyday objects; conversations about death inside a miniature model of life; and a dreary office through which one can dream of a new beginning.

In each of the films, the sets and objects are not merely a backdrop, but a creative force that gives new form to experiences of identity, memory, and loss.

Phone Bill
Ohav Flantz
1993
19:23 min.

A spiritual hypochondriac, a psychologizing bulimic, a perverted painter, a camp transvestite, a hysterical meatball, a compulsive gossip, and a plain bitch debate, through telephone calls and answering machines, how to celebrate the birthday of their beloved friend Or, himself a “suicidal type.”

N. Braun’s Last Supper
Netalie Braun
2004
15:15 min.

A young woman takes her own life and leaves her loved ones an unusual final request: to eat her body at a lavish and carefully designed feast. During the meal, her friends and family recall the messages they left for her on the phone.

I Think This Is the Closest to How the Photograph Looked
Yuval Hameiri, Michal Vaknin
2012
9:37 min.

Using modest means, a man reconstructs a lost memory: the memory of his last day with his mother. Objects come to life in a desperate attempt to recreate a single moment that once existed and is now gone. A cinematic work of object theater that seeks to touch the fine line between memory and forgetting.

Nothing Special
Efrat Berger
2024
14 min.

Two women sit within four walls and wait. One waits for death, which refuses to come and take her. The other waits for life to begin. The film depicts their attempts to escape the “nothingness,” and their realization that even nothingness can sometimes be special. Based on a documentary interview.

The Things We Do for Love and Foreign Citizenship
Eyal Segarsky
2025
14:32 min.

Nini and Aya try to obtain a foreign passport and abandon the sinking ship that is the State of Israel. When Nini realizes the absurd, painful, and bloody cost of emigration, he must decide whether it is a price he is willing to pay. If not for himself, then for Aya and for future generations.

Curated by Yuli Shiloach, a narrative and documentary filmmaker. Admission is free.

An invitation to open work sessions toward a new production by the Jason Danino Holt Theatre Company, set to premiere in early 2027.

Participants: Anna Harit, Noam Imber, Iyar Elezra, Omer Yefet, Yotam Yaniv, Genderika, Elior Chen, Shakita, and Mila Levy

An invitation to open work sessions: the first rehearsals for a project that still has no idea what it is, and a series of especially unraveled experiments toward a new production by the Jason Danino Holt Theatre Company, set to premiere in early 2027.

Participants: Anna Harit, Noam Imber, Iyar Elezra, Omer Yefet, Yotam Yaniv, Genderika, Elior Chen, Shakita, and Mila Levy – present in spirit, if not in body.

Dramaturgy: Yair Vardi
Space: Shahaf Bir
Production: Delphi Ofroni

Flow Writing Workshop

Advance registration is required here.

A warm-up, a flow, inspiration, and getting acquainted.

A personal writing workshop, alongside strangers, in the first person. Three hours of surprising, associative, and guided immersion.

Why come? To arrive with nothing, let go, receive prompts, and discover what emerges. More importantly, to see whom the universe has seated beside you, to listen and make yourself heard, and above all, to discover the unexpected directions from which inspiration can arrive.

Join us this summer for film screenings, dance performances, workshops, lectures, and more!

Poetry Beyond the Medium

An evening from a queer multidisciplinary poetry series, featuring flirtation, experimentation, and playful encounters between text-based works and a range of artistic media.

Thursday, August 13, at 7:00 PM

Artistic direction: Neta Lev-Tov and Nur Shani Tahan

Admission is free.

Screening and Conversation with Oz Malul and Shay-Lee Uziel – Tuesday, August 18

Life Drawing with Yair Peretz – Friday, August 21, at 10:00 AM

End-of-Summer Karaoke – Tuesday, August 25, at 8:00 PM

A launch celebrating the publication of a new artist book by Ruti de Vries, accompanied by a musical performance by soprano Tal Ganor, poetry readings by Larissa Miller and Sharon Kantor, and a conversation between the participants.

Ruti de Vries (b. 1989, Tel Aviv) lives and works in Tel Aviv. She holds an MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, 2015, and a B.Ed. in Art and Education from Hamidrasha Faculty of the Arts, Beit Berl College, 2012. A graduate of Artport’s 2024 residency program, she is currently completing an artist residency and exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, supported by Artis. While there, she also printed her new book in collaboration with designer Avi Bohbot.

Over the years, de Vries’s artistic practice has developed like a spiral, gathering more and more motifs and materials without abandoning those that came before. She works across a wide range of media, including installation, sculpture, painting, sewing, graphic art, and animation. Her work draws inspiration from numerous traditions and sources, among them ancient art, folk art, outsider art, fashion, and theater.

Over time, de Vries has constructed a rich lexicon of images, materials, themes, and meanings – a kind of personal cosmology in which distinctions between human and animal, feminine and masculine, organic and artificial begin to dissolve. Ornamentation, patterns, symmetry, and repetition – all defining features of handicraft – recur throughout her work. When brought into contact with sculpture, they generate a productive tension between two-dimensionality and volume, graphic form and sculptural presence, sign and embodiment.

Tal Ganor is a soprano and graduate of the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University and the Israeli Opera’s Meitar Opera Studio. As a soloist with the Israeli Opera, she has performed a wide range of roles, including Belinda in Dido and Aeneas, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Papagena and Pamina in The Magic Flute, Monica in The Medium, Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, and Amore in Orfeo ed Euridice.

She has performed with the Teatro Real in Madrid, the Festival della Valle d’Itria in Martina Franca, the Aix-en-Provence Festival, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Camerata Jerusalem, the Barrocade Ensemble, and others. She has also performed and recorded with Yoni Rechter, Shem-Tov Levi, and the Tziporela Ensemble, and took part in the production Hubeza at the Cameri Theatre with the Revolution Orchestra.

In 2025, she directed and performed the role of Anna in Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, a production staged at the Alpha Theatre and supported by a grant from the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts. Ganor is a recipient of scholarships from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, the Israel Vocal Arts Institute, the Besser Foundation, the Eli Leon Foundation, and the Rotary Club of Martina Franca. At the 2012 Aviv Competitions, she won both the Vocal Performance Prize and the Audience Choice Award.