section Documentary Film Competition

Know Hope

  • Omer Shamir
  • IL/US
  • 2025
  • 74

As reality in Israel-Palestine grows increasingly fractured, street artist Know Hope turns the public sphere into a charged site of resistance, rooted in empathy. Through spare, poetic interventions, he traces the fault lines between private pain and collective trauma in public space.

In Know Hope, director Omer Shamir shapes a layered cinematic dialogue with an artist whose long-standing practice unfolds against the escalating fracture of life in Israel-Palestine. The film observes his deceptively simple public gestures, such as a painted line on a wall overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, reading “THE STORIES WE TELL” on one side and “THE STORIES THEY TELL” on the other, revealing how these quiet yet politically charged acts reclaim contested spaces as arenas of shared reflection and civil resistance.

Moving fluidly between urban walls, open hillsides, and intimate close-ups, the film reveals how chronic illness renders the artist’s physical fragility inseparable from the collective wounds that permeate the landscape.

In a gesture of cinematic solidarity, Shamir’s visual language aligns with the artist’s own ethic of presence and care, shaping a work that stands as a testament to empathetic resistance and an insistence on human connection in times of rupture. Winner of the Best Film Award at Docaviv.

Text: Naomi Levari


Weitere Vorführung:

8.05. 19:30 JÜDISCHES THEATERSCHIFF MS GOLDBERG


Credits

original title Know Hope

JFBB section Documentary Film Competition

  • director Omer Shamir

country/countries IL/US

year 2025

duration 74