Biography
Michale Boganim was born on July 17, 1977, in Haifa, Israel, to a modern Orthodox Jewish family. As a result of the 1982 Lebanon conflict, the family emigrated to France in 1984. Boganim studied political science and anthropology at the Sorbonne in Paris, where filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch was one of her professors. She went on to study sociology, philosophy, and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Back in Paris, she worked as a production and directing assistant for various film companies. She then began studying film and directing, first at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle in Saint-Gilles, Belgium, and then at the National Film and Television School in London. There she made two 35-minute documentaries: "Dust" (UK 2000), about Yiddish culture in Odessa, and her graduation film "Mémoires incertaines" ("Forgotten Memories", UK FR 2001), about the search for her family identity and a mysterious great uncle. Both films won awards at various festivals, including Cannes and Leeds.
Boganim's first documentary feature film, "Odessa, Odessa" (FR 2004), was screened at numerous international film festivals, including Sundance and the Berlinale Forum in 2005, where it was awarded the CICAE Prize. It portrays Russian Jews who remained in Odessa after World War II or who moved to Ashdod, Israel, or to the New York borough of Brooklyn as exiles.
In the following years, Boganim made several short documentaries. Her first fiction feature film, "Verwundete Erde" ("Land of Oblivion", FR/DE/PL 2011), about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, was also shown at international festivals, including Venice, Chicago, Munich and Tokyo. In her documentary "Mizrahim, les oubliés de la Terre Promise" ("The Forgotten Ones", FR 2021), Boganim followed the footsteps of her father, who came from Morocco and joined a movement in Israel inspired by the American Black Panthers that fought against discrimination against Arab Jews, the so-called Mizrahim.
At the Tokyo Film Festival in October, Michale Boganim presented the feature film "Tel Aviv - Beirut" (FR/DE/CY), an epic story of friendship and family set against the backdrop of the Lebanese conflicts. The German theatrical release was in fall 2023.