The Green Dumpster Mystery

Awards

Yad Vashem Award, Jerusalem International Film Festival 2008 (Chairman’s Award for Artistic Achievement in a Holocaust-related film)

Selected Festival Screenings

Jerusalem International Film Festival
IDFA – International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
Palm Springs International Film Festival
National Center For Jewish Film Annual Festival
Washington Jewish Film Festival
Toronto Jewish Film Festival
Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival
Calgary Jewish Film Festival
Chicago Festival Of Israeli Cinema
Syracuse International Film Festival

Traveling on his scooter through Tel Aviv, filmmaker Tal Haim Yoffe finds a discarded box of old photographs in a green dumpster. This docu-detective film, slowly unwinds a family history, beginning in Lodz, Poland, and traveling through the Siberian Gulag, a Samarkand sugar plant, a Ha’apala ship and the battlefields of the Sinai Peninsula. Like Daniel Mendelsohn's bestseller The Lost and David Ofek’s film No. 17 is Anonymous, this tightly-paced tour de force vividly evokes the now-extinguished lives of an anonymous—but typical—Israeli family.

“I think there are thousands of families with not exactly the same story but families with Holocaust survivors as grandparents and great-grandparents, with IDF soldiers who got killed. It’s a typical family, and a tragic family. Everything that could have happened to them, happened to them.”
-Director Tal Haim Yoffe

Press Quotes

“Like Daniel Mendelsohn's nonfiction bestseller The Lost, documentary The Green Dumpster Mystery, from multihyphenate Tal Haim Yoffe, vividly evokes the now-extinguished lives of an extended family seared by the Holocaust and modern Israeli tragedies. A tightly paced tour de force of detection, narrated in unpretentious voice over by the filmmaker, engrossing picture achieves a unique tone that's not oppressively heavy. Tech credits are pro, with musical score a standout. Touching yet unsentimental, it represents a quality find for fests and broadcasters and deserves long life on DVD.” – Alissa Simon, Variety

“One of the best Israeli films of recent times. In an ostensibly light tone, which balances the serious subjects in the film - history and memory, Holocaust and bereavement - the film tells the story of the director himself who, as he rode his scooter through South Tel Aviv, found a stash of old photographs in a dumpster.

In the wake of this find, he sets out on a quest to find the people in the photo. Gradually, as in a very good thriller, in which secrets are revealed with increasing dramatic and emotional force, the director sets the stage for an Israeli family saga.

Yoffe succeeds in digressing from a personal story into a drama with symbolic power. This is a serious, complex and important work.” – Uri Klein, Haartetz

Credits

A One Man Films Production
With assistance from The New Israeli Foundation for Film and Television
Produced, Directed & Written by Tal Haim Yoffe
Camera Ari Amit
Editor Anat Lachovitz
Music By Dani Reichental
Featuring Tal Haim Yoffe, Dani Walkowicz, Mati Ben-Ari, Sivan Ben-Ari, Neta Gold, Bracha Klichewski and Friedrich Mücke

External Links

Review, Jewish Journal
Review, J.B. Spins
Review, Epoch TImes

Purchase DVD

HOME USE ONLY

$29.95 plus shipping
Home Use Only DVD (Not for Classroom/Institutional Use)

Does not include Public Performance Rights
Home Use Policy (pdf)

EDUCATIONAL USE

$90.00 plus shipping
Classroom/Library Use Only
DVD

Does not include Public Performance Rights
Educational Use Policy (pdf)

Also Directed by Tal Haim Yoffe

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