Nuritt Aviv: Traduire (2011)

A four-day tribute to Nurith Aviv presented jointly with Fordham Center for Jewish Studies, Fordham Center for Religion and Culture.

Post-screening discussion: Nurith Aviv in conversation with Aviya Kushner, Jacques Lezra, James Redfield.

In this Babelic film, translators from different corners of the world speak in their own tongues, recounting their encounters with Hebrew literature across the centuries—from the Midrash and medieval poetry to contemporary fiction. They speak with fervor, revealing how translation can be an act of both devotion and defiance, sometimes bending the very structures of their own languages to carry across the soul of another.

Nurith Aviv: The long shots where nothing happens, but everything is said.

Nurith Aviv, born on March 11, 1945 in Tel Aviv, completed her secondary education and training as a photographer there. She worked as a press photographer for three years. In 1964, she entered the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris.

You have been in France for four years, you have worked with directors such as Allio, Varda, Van Effenterre, Féret, etc. Furthermore, you tell us that you have made mini-documentaries and that this is important to you; you have also worked on video…

Yes, it is very important for me to work in both fiction and documentary cinema, I play on a completely different sensibility. In fiction, the image is planned in advance by the director, with or without my collaboration: we know the end before pressing the button, and the finality is very consciously targeted. In documentary, I work much more by improvising. I usually have the camera in my hand, and when I press the button I don’t know where I’m going to go, rather I let myself go, and I follow the events. I listen to them, I’m taken by them, and I like the shot to last and not have to stop, even if the action seems over, to go beyond the time of information and enter this other time, that of sensation. […] We felt it very strongly when filming Daguerreotypes with Agnès Varda, it was also made of long shots where nothing happens, but everything is said.

Nurith Aviv, Filmer la parole. Edited by Claire Buchbinder with Marianne Dautrey and Nathalie Georges-Lambrichs. Exils Éditeur, Paris

FULL CALENDAR

Tuesday, April 22, 7:00 pm

Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue

Traduire (Translating) [1h10m] (2011)

Post-screening conversation: Nurith Aviv with Aviya Kushner, Jacques Lezra, James Redfield

Wednesday, April 23, 7:00 pm

Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue

Langue sacrée, Langue parlée (Sacred Tongue, Spoken Language) (2008) [1h13m]

Post-screening conversation: Nurith Aviv with Ofer Dynes, Aviya Kushner, Jacques Lezra, and Moulie Vidas

Thursday, April 24, 6:30 pm

Bookhouse, 15 West 16th Street, 6th floor

Words That Remain [52m]

Bruly Bouabré’s Alphabet [17m] (2005)

Post-screening conversation: Nurith Aviv in conversation with Gil Anidjar, Cynthia Madansky, James Redfield, and Moulie Vidas

Friday, April 25, 10:00 am

Bookhouse, 15 West 16th Street, 6th floor

D’une langue à l’autre (From Language to Language) [55m] (2004)

Allenby, Passage [5m] (2001)

Post-screening conversation: Nurith Aviv in conversation with Gil Anidjar, Yemane Demissie, Cynthia Madansky, and Richard Peña

TICKETS

Tickets are free for Fordham University’s and Centro Primo Levi’s subscribers who order them before April 17th and pick them up at the door 40 minutes before the beginning of the program. Tickets for the general public will go on sale on April 18th and can be purchased online or, if the screening is not sold out, at the box office on the nights of the event.

$15 General Admission

$10 Students and Seniors

All programs are held in English and the films are subtitled.

Nurith Aviv (Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine, 1945) has directed eighteen documentary films. Her works investigate language and move lyrically through the landscapes, collective myths, and intimate narratives that shape humans’ ways of being together. The first woman to be a director of photography in France, she has shot a hundred fiction and documentary films with directors such as Agnès Varda, Amos Gitai, René Allio, and Jacques Doillon. She has received important prizes, including the Edouard Glissant Prize (2009) and the Grand Prix de l’Académie française (2019). Her works have been shown in multiple retrospectives in Paris, including a week-long one last month. She has been the subject of a movie (Woman with a Camera by Zohar Behrendt, 2023) and now of a book (Filmer la Parole, 2025). This tribute, the fruit of a collaboration between the Fordham University Center for Jewish Studies, the Primo Levi Center, and the Fordham Center on Religious and Culture, is the first of its kind in New York City. It will gather long-time Aviv fans, newcomers to her work, and lovers of language from all backgrounds to celebrate through images and words this exceptional director on her 80th birthday.