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PRODUCTION / FUNDING Israel

Idan Haguel’s Concerned Citizen set to premiere in the Berlinale Panorama

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- The Israeli director is returning to Berlin with his sophomore feature, a satirical parable on the insidious ways in which privilege can unleash the prejudice within

Idan Haguel’s Concerned Citizen set to premiere in the Berlinale Panorama
Concerned Citizen by Idan Haguel (© Idan Haguel/Guy Sahaf)

Ben thinks of himself as a liberal and enlightened gay man, living in the perfect flat with his boyfriend Raz. All that’s missing to complete the picture is a baby, which the couple are trying to make a reality. Meanwhile, Ben decides to improve his up-and-coming neighbourhood in gritty south Tel Aviv by planting a new tree on his street. But his good deed soon triggers a sequence of events that leads to the brutal police arrest of an Eritrean immigrant. The guilt trip that ensues will fundamentally challenge Ben’s vision of himself and his society, in the process threatening to destroy his relationship and aspirations of fatherhood.

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This is the story behind Concerned Citizen, a satirical parable on the insidious ways in which privilege can unleash the prejudice within, written and directed by Idan Haguel. The sophomore feature by the Israeli director will have its world premiere in the Panorama section of the 72nd Berlinale, as the filmmaker returns to Berlin six years after his debut feature, Inertia, was screened in Forum.

Haguel describes the movie as a “white guilt-trip dark comedy about a gentrificator” who lives in a neglected neighbourhood in south Tel Aviv, and whose neighbours include Eritrean refugees. The environment forces him to discover unpleasant aspects of his character that he didn’t know existed. The film was shot in the flat where the director lived for many years, in south Tel Aviv, and he wished to remain truthful to the atmosphere and events that took place in the area. The lead couple in the film, Shlomi Bertonov and Ariel Wolf, are a couple in real life, and that was important for Haguel, as the dynamics were near-impossible to achieve with actors who were not a real couple, or not gay. The same goes for the actors who play the characters of the refugees in the film: they are real refugees from the “Sands Theater Group” (a detention facility for asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea located in the desert in Israel).

Concerned Citizen is being produced by Idan Haguel, along with Gil Sima, Binyamin Gurevitch and Itay Akirav, and is being supported by the Israel Cinema Project, Rabinovich Foundation. Berlin-based sales agent m-appeal is handling the film internationally.

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