Tel Aviv-Jaffa

Summary

In celebration of the 100 year anniversary of the establishment of Tel Aviv, the film depicts the remarkable, moving and humorous story of the largest and most important city in Israel, the secular and youthful alternative to Jerusalem.

Supported by in depth research and rare archival material, the film follows Tel Aviv from its inception as an unpretentious neighborhood on the outskirts of Ottoman Jaffa, to the establishment of the State of Israel in the municipal museum of the big city that sprouted from that same neighborhood. The film also documents the fate of Jaffa, the city that gave birth to Tel Aviv and that was subsequently engulfed therein.  It portrays the plethora of national conflicts, the political tensions and the cultural contradictions that made Tel Aviv-Jaffa a unique, vibrant city and an international metropolis, albeit very local.

Tel Aviv-Jaffa was produced by Anat Zeltser and Modi Bar-On, Israel's leading team of documentary filmmakers. They created as vibrant, diverse and intense a film as the city that it depicts - an opulent collage of rare footage of the city's history and an impressive documentation of the architectural gems that provide Tel Aviv its status as a World Heritage site.

Israeli TV actor Modi Bar-On guides us through the story with vivacity and humor and does not leave out its embarrassing moments - the trees that fell along the fake boulevard created to impress Winston Churchill, the sewage pipe that was undersized and resulted in a decade long prohibition to bathe in the sea and the ticket the police gave Mayor Dizengoff for bathing nude in the sea.