Docs for Education
Israeli director and editor Erez Laufer gave me a link to his father’s film website, Docs for Education, an amazing initiative, in Nahum Laufer’s own words ”devoted to distributing high quality creative documentaries suitable for educational purposes”. For those of you who doubt that there is a market for documentaries outside television and cinema and home video, take a look at the site that mentions where the (9) films are available – and to which prizes. Quite impressive! Here is the motivation of Nahum Laufer, taken from the site:
“I was born in 1935 in Poland. During WWII, my mother and I escaped from the Nazis in a journey that ended in Bombay, India. It was during research for a documentary film about my personal life that I became familiar with another fascinating and un-familiar story, that of The Darien, which became the subject of my first script.
The film “The Darien Dilemma” was directed by my son, Erez Laufer, and edited by my daughter, Miri Laufer. The three of us continued our collaboration in “Rafting to Bombay“, the film which tells my own personal story.
It was during the creation of these two deeply personal documentary films with my son that I acknowledged the instructive value of this media. Receiving enthusiastic responses from universities, schools, public libraries and other institutions encouraged us to create a small selection of unique, insightful documentary films with educational value.”
Photo from “To See If I’m Smiling”, the strong film by Tamar Yarom about women soldiers in the Israeli army.