Tiburon International Film Festival

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For Kings of the Hill, Yael Bartana filmed people gathering at the bottom of the dunes at the coast near Tel Aviv. They meet here every Friday, late in the afternoon when the Sabbath begins. We see them trying, time and again, to drive their all-terrain cars up the sand bulges, which are much too steep. Like crabs on the beach they try again and again, but they hardly ever make it to the top.

Bartana makes a meticulous use of camera standpoints, composition, light and editing to create beautiful images and gently ease them away from reality. She shows the event as a romantic, slightly deviant variation on a street race. But this first impression is also the start of a thread that connects the fate of bored rich men’s children in a country governed by eternal struggle with the rules of the Sabbath and the work of Sisyphus.

She was born in 1970 in Afula, Israel, and currently lives and works in Israel and The Netherlands.

Films