Ayelet
Bargur

Ayelet Bargur was born in 1969 in San Francisco and since 1970 has lived in Israel. From 1992 until 1996, she studied Filmmaking and Production as well as Cinema and Art Studies at the Camera Obscura Art School and at Tel Aviv University. From 1995 to 1997, she was a scholarship holder of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. It was at this time that she made her second short film “A Good Place to Be” (1996), which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Her documentaries and feature films have been screened at numerous festivals and have received many awards. In 2003 and 2004, Bargur took part in the project “Moments Israel” at the Jerusalem Film Festival with a short film. Invited by the Akademie der Künste, Bargur spent summer 2004 as a guest of the 7th International Summer Academy in Rüdersdorf near Berlin.

Bargur has also been responsible for highly-regarded cinema and television productions in Israel. Her films critically reflect daily life in Israel, be it with a documentary looking at the death of young recruits in the Israeli army in “At the End of the Day” (2000), the disillusioned state of the unemployed Israeli youth in “Day by Day” (2003), or a microchip factory in the middle of the desert in “So Near So Far” (2003). In the feature film “As If Nothing Happened” (2000), an Israeli family remains in the dark as to whether their eldest son, a soldier, has fallen victim to a suicide attack on the 21st January 1995.

Ayelet Bargur’s stay in Berlin in 2003 turned out to be a trip back into her own family history, to the time before the Second World War: in 1992 her great-great-aunt, Beate Berger, took charge of the first Jewish children’s home Beith Ahawah (House of Love) in Berlin. Between 1934 and 1939, she succeeded in helping more than 100 children emigrate to Israel.

Currently, Bargur is working on a film about the children’s home. Her search for vestiges of it has been documented in her book “Ahawah means love. The Story of the Jewish childrens’ home on Berlin’s Auguststrasse” (2006, published by dtv). Ayelet Bargur lives in Tel Aviv.