Each year, the director of the winning film each year received a three-thousand-dollar prize, and the Visual Center dedicated itself to the promotion of the award-winning films. For example, Tal Hayim Yoffe's documentary The Green Dumpster Mystery, which garnered the award in 2008, was screened at a special Yad Vashem event the same year, commemorating seventy years since the November Pogroms (Kristallnacht), and featuring the film director and the late author Amir Guttfreund. Since then, the film has been shown numerous times at film festivals, academic conferences and commemoration events, as well as at teacher training seminars in Israel and abroad. “The Avner Shalev Award brought The Green Dumpster Mystery to audiences that might not have had access to it otherwise, especially to Jewish communities, film festivals and schools in multiple countries," said Yoffe. "As a result, thousands of viewers have seen my film."
Wladyslaw Pasikowski's 2012 feature film Aftermath, which won the Avner Shalev Award in 2013, was inspired by the massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbors in 1941 in the town of Jedwabne. Jan T. Gross’ book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001), was the major source of information about what happened at Jedwabne, which was virtually unknown until the book appeared. Pasikowski’s Aftermath re-opened the controversy about the event, and though the film was lauded by luminaries such as veteran filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, Pasikowski received death threats and the film's distribution in Poland was ultimately put on hold. All of this presaged the 2018 Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance passed in Poland. Nonetheless, Aftermath was shown in the US and Israel. The Visual Center presented the film on several occasions, culminating in a screening before an audience of more than a thousand at the Yad Vashem Film Club in three Israeli cinematheques.
Another noteworthy European winner was the Hungarian film 1945 directed by Ferenc Török (2017), one of Hungary’s most important filmmakers of the new millennium. As in other films of his, in 1945, Török focused on the impact of the return of Jewish survivors to their now Judenrein hometown, delving deeply into how Hungarians cope with the cataclysms of their more recent history. The Visual Center sponsored Hebrew subtitles for 1945, which has been screened to hundreds of viewers in multiple settings. "The Avner Shalev Award is a special honor," commented Török.
"The global success of the film can be attributed to the Award to a great extent, since it attracted the interest of the press. I am very grateful for this tribute."
Three courageous works that also won the Award deal with the actions of perpetrators and their collaborators: Human Failure (Michael Verhoeven, 2008), A Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did (David Evans, 2015) and Radical Evil (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2013). The Visual Center organized screenings of all these films at cinematheques throughout Israel and they have been featured at many teacher-training seminars as well as other venues.
Ruzowitzky, who called Radical Evil "an experiment in many ways," was particularly moved to receive the award. “Yad Vashem is an institution like no other, that deals with ways to educate people – in particular a younger generation – about the horrors of the Shoah,” he said in a recent email to the Visual Center.
“For me, the message of the Avner Shalev Award was: ‘Yes, this is a legitimate and interesting new way to present history.' This was all I could have hoped for.”
A unique winner of the Avner Shalev Award was Cabaret Berlin (2010), Fabienne Rousso-Lenoir’s tour de force compilation of footage from German musical films from the 1920s and 1930s, with a soundtrack comprising excerpts from political satirical writing of the period with her own commentary on Weimar Germany. The film was screened before Israeli audiences in the presence of Rousso-Lanoire at all Israeli cinematheques, a tour sponsored by the Visual Center, as well as in France and other countries. "Receiving the Avner Shalev Award was one of the greatest and most moving honors of my life," stated Rousso-Lanoire. "Yad Vashem has a special place in my heart, as well as in my family's story and history," said Rousso-Lenoire.
"This award is also a tribute to my grandparents and so very young uncle whose beloved names I have registered at Yad Vashem… it has also enlarged the audience and interest in the film and has allowed me to show it at many festivals, Jewish and nonJewish, all over the world."
Avant-garde director Chantal Akerman's last film, No Home Movie (2015), which received the Avner Shalev Award the same year, as well as the most recent winner of the award Golda Maria by Patrick and Hugo Sobelman (2020) both demonstrated that it is not always clear where a filmed testimony ends and a self-conscious cinematic creation about memory begins. In this way, these films extend the boundaries of the family film, the memoir and the video diary. On December 2020, Patrick Sobelman said at the online reception ceremony due to the covid-19 pandemic: “We are so honored to receive the Avner Shalev Award, and we hope to meet, screen and share the film, 'next year in Jerusalem!'”
"Winning the Avner Shalev Award became an important accomplishment for filmmakers for promoting their films among the public at large, as well as for raising Holocaust awareness," said Liat Benhabib, Director of the Yad Vashem Visual Center. "As [former Yad Vashem Chairman] Avner Shalev said, this award was established to acknowledge that film has become the most compelling international language, whose influence will only grow with time. We thank the Jerusalem International Film Festival for hosting the Award for the last fifteen years, and look forward to the Award’s new horizons. Finally, we are deeply grateful to Leon and Michaela Constantiner, whose ongoing support helps us to achieve and maintain such a varied and top-quality contributions to Holocaust cinema."
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 96.
