TAU student film at Tribeca Film Festival

Atara Frish, a student at the Tel Aviv University's Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, received an honorable mention in the "Student Vision" category at the Tribeca Film Festival for her short film "The Love Letter", starring Gili Beit Halachmi, Ravit Dor and Shir Abramov.

The film was screened in the short film competition of the festival with 55 films selected from the 4,754 short films that were submitted. "The Love Letter" was the only Israeli film screened at the competition.

The story of the film (19 min) tells of Noa (Gili Beit Halachmi), a dedicated recruits commander in the Israeli military, who receives a mysterious love letter from one of her female soldiers. The suspicion that the letter is not authentic forces her to cope with the dilemma of devotion, the restrictions of military discipline, and her yearning to feel, if only for a moment, loved.

Short films and the “Heroine” project 

"The Love Letter" was produced as part of the "Heroine" project - a full-length film that combines five short films created by five directors, produced by the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television under the artistic direction of Michal Vinik and Maya Dreifuss and produced by Efrat Cohen (Gaudeamus Productions), and screened worldwide.

Atara Frish previously directed the short film "My Beautiful Sister" (starring Moran Rosenblatt), which was screened at various festivals around the world. In the last four years Frisch has produced a variety of short films, among them "Resen (Dog Leash)", which was part of the Cinefondation official competition at the Cannes Films Festival in 2012, and "Humor", which was part of the Independent Film Festival in Rome in 2014.

She has also served as director of the International Student Film Festival at Tel Aviv University, the biggest student film festival in the world, where she also initiated the T-Port project: the world's first online platform for the promotion and distribution of student films. These days Atara is working on a television series based on her short film "The Love Letter" and is writing a screenplay for her first feature length film.

TAU at Tribeca

This is not the first time that the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television has produced a short film the was part of the official competition at Tribeca. In 2011, the film "Eva – Working Title," by Dor Fadlon, a student at TAU, won an honorable mention in the same competition.

In 2012, "Stitches", the film by Adiya Imri Orr, won the best short film award awarded to her by actress Susan Sarandon, and in 2016, the film "The Operator," a film by the student Ben Hakim, was also accepted into the competition.