Renen Schorr Dies: Director, Activist & Founder Of The Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School Was 72

deadline.com:

Israeli filmmaker Renen Schorr, founder of the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School, has died at the age of 72. The school, which opened in 1989, was a gamechanger for Israeli cinema with alumni over the past 35 years including Nir Bergman (Broken Wings), Nadav Lapid (Synonymes), Tom Shoval (Youth), Talya Lavie (Zero Motivation) and Rama Burshtein (Fill The Void).

Schorr, who was born in Jerusalem in 1952, built his career alongside the fledgeling Israeli film industry to become a seminal figure in its development later on.

A filmmaker in his own right, his best-known work is the 1987 drama Late Summer Blues. Set in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, it follows a group of seven high school graduates in their final summer together before being conscripted into the Israeli army.

The screenplay was inspired by Schorr’s involvement in the 1970 Senior’s Letter to Prime Minister Golda Meir – in which a group of high school students questioned the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and suggested they would only sign up for the draft if the government committed to peace – as well as his experiences working as a journalist for the official army magazine during the Yom Kippur war in 1973.