Avril 2027 à Juin 2027
Erez Pery is a filmmaker, film scholar and curator whose work explores the intersections of cinema, history, memory and politics. He is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Audio and Visual Arts at Sapir College, where he served as Head of the B.A. Program in Film from 2014 to 2017. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Media from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
His films include The Interrogation (2016), which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and One-Way Street (2020), a documentary essay inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin. His scholarly work focuses on cinema, historiography and the representation of the Holocaust. He is the author of Cinema and the Nazi Death Apparatus (2020).
From 2006 to 2019, Pery served as Artistic Director of the Cinema South International Film Festival, where he curated retrospectives and programs devoted to contemporary cinema from around the world. He also initiated the Israeli edition of Produire au Sud, the international training program of Nantes’ Festival des 3 Continents, and was editor-in-chief of Cinema South, a journal dedicated to radical and political cinema.
The Storyteller from Jerusalem
The Storyteller from Jerusalem is practice-based cinematic research exploring Jerusalem between 1904 and 1948 through the archive of Palestinian musician and chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh. His diaries, photographs and music offer traces of the city’s cultural and everyday life during the late Ottoman period and the British Mandate.
Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s understanding of history as unfinished, Erez Pery returns to Jawhariyyeh’s archive as a political act in the present. Without detaching it from the histories of colonialism, nationalism, occupation and conflict that have shaped Jerusalem, he seeks to rescue from the past unrealized possibilities that might expand political imagination amid the violence and crisis of the present.
Conceived as a cinematic opera, the research brings archival fragments, text and live music into a non-linear montage. Through practices of de-archiving and re-archiving, it seeks to decolonize the archive, treating music and images not as illustrations of history but as forms of historical knowledge.
Selected Filmography
One-Way Street (2020), feature documentary, 52 min.
The Interrogation (2016), feature film, 84 min.
Solitude (2015), video essay, 15 min.
For an Imperfect Cinema (2004), video essay, 27 min.
Selected Publications
Pery, Erez. Cinema and the Nazi Death Apparatus. Resling, 2020.
Pery, Erez. “The Time and Space of the (Other) Planet — Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la Luz.” Takriv, no. 3, 2012.
Pery, Erez. “Cinema / Letter / Image.” Takriv, no. 1, 2011.
Editorial Work
Cinema South — Editor-in-Chief, 2007–2014. Annual journal dedicated to radical and political cinema.