Cinema South Festival
http://csf.sapir.ac.il/?page_id=26&lang=en

Since 2002, the Film and Television School of Sapir College has been
coordinating the Cinema South Festival, which was held at the Sderot
Cinemateque. The motto of the festival in the words of Avner Faingulerent,
the executive director and initiator of the festival: “The Cinema South
Festival is a cinematic weltanschauung that advocates a richly humanistic
cinema operating on a shoestring budget”.

In the first few years, the Festival was modest and served as a local and
small event. However, in 2004 the Festival became well recognized and
attracted many individuals from throughout Israel. Staff from the Sapir
College planed, coordinated and implemented the entire event. In addition,
the College invested a great deal of resources for the benefit of the
festival. On 2006 the festival appointed Mr. Erez Pery as the Program
Director of the Cinema South Festival.

The festival became within a few years a well respected international film
festival that gives a central stage to Israeli cinema and world cinema. The
festival exposes the audience in the south (but not only them) to the modern
cinema with all of its colors and diversity and at the same time spreads and
exposes the Israeli local cinema scene to the world; Since it was
established, the Israeli cinematic programs of the festival appeared in
France, Switzerland, the U.S., and London. In recent years the festival has
won a great deal of meaningful exposure in the international press and
appeared in leading newspapers such as the British Independent and France’s
Le Monde.

The secret of the success of the Festival lies in this unique, innovative
connection, as it contains vision, faith and real truth, which attempt to
affect the design of the Israeli society.