My friend Asher Tlalim, who has died aged 72, was an Israeli film-maker with a rare ability to combine documentary and experimental styles. According to Stephen Frears, his colleague at the National Film and Television School, where he taught from 1998 to 2020, “he added a whole new dimension” to film-making.
Born in Tangier as Mesod Bentolila, the child of Jacob Bentolila, a merchant, and Esther (nee Ben-Okhaion), who raised their seven children, he moved with his family to Spain and then Israel in 1960 where he was given the more Hebrew-sounding name “Asher”. He attended a yeshiva in Bnei-Brak, Israel, and was among the first batch of film students at Beit-Zvi school of performing arts in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. He served in the Israel Defence Forces, fighting in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, before choosing the surname “Tlalim” and arriving in the UK in 1998.
His army experience marked him deeply, as did the death of his brother, Shalom Carlos, in combat, informing a lifelong commitment to processing trauma through cinema. Questioning the narratives that perpetuate violence, he progressively distanced himself from the policies of Israel towards the Palestinians. His most famous UK film, Galoot (2004), includes a 12-minute tracking shot of a Palestinian student activist who tells the story of the dispossession of his people.
His most famous film internationally, Don’t Touch My Holocaust (1994), the winner of the Israel Ophir prize (known as the Israeli Academy awards), is an adaptation of the play Arbeit Macht Frei, which staged the Holocaust as a dirge and a horror show. Outside the world of film, Asher was also an innovator. In 1979 he was involved in the cultivation of an alternative ecological communityin the Galilee, called Klil, which involved no land expropriation.
Asher’sfilms have been screened from London to Jerusalem, Berlin, New York and Hollywood. In 2019, a retrospective of 20 of his films was screened in Israel. In 2007, he became the coordinator of the Pears Short Film Fund at UK Jewish Film, and in 2016 of the UK Jewish FilmLab, which helps aspiring film-makers develop their proposals for funding. The focus of his teaching was on helping the next generation of film-makers to find a film language attuned to the traumas of the time.
Asher’s first marriage, to Miri Straus Tlalim ended in divorce. He met Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, a scholar of Tibetan medicine, at Tel-Aviv University in 1989, and they married in 1993. He is survived by Ronit, their children Avigail and Jonathan,and two children, Tom and Anael,from his first marriage.
