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. Brown’s Last Supper
Natali 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 Va’aknin
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.