Filming Words – Nurith Aviv: Screenings and Conversations, Day 4

Join us for a screening of From Language to Language (2004) and Allenby, Passage (2001) with Nurith Aviv in conversation with Gil Anidjar, Yemane Demissie, Cynthia Madansky, and Richard Peña

Co-sponsored by Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies, Centro Primo Levi, and Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture

The transformation of Hebrew from a language set apart to the common speech of a nation happened within a handful of decades. Yet this triumph came at a cost: the erasure, sometimes violent, of the languages that once lived in its speakers’ minds and mouths. From Language to Language (2004) gathers a chorus of exiles of language—poets, writers, singers, and actors—who search for new roots as they remain wooed by the echoes of the past.

In Allenby, Passage (2001), an oneiric video essay, the director retraces her father’s steps along a passage of Allenby Street in Tel Aviv, where he once bought his photographic equipment. Amid the rustling of chatter rising from the street, the camera turns its gaze to fleeting details, intercepted in their evanescence. As Aviv once described her work as a cinematographer, this film attempts to capture the “beats of time.”

Nurith Aviv (Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine, 1945) has directed ​​18 documentary films. Her works investigate language and move lyrically through the landscapes, collective myths, and intimate narratives that shape humans’ ways of being together. The first woman to be a director of photography in France, she has shot a hundred fiction and documentary films with directors such as Agnès Varda, Amos Gitai, René Allio, and Jacques Doillon. She has received important prizes, including the Edouard Glissant Prize (2009) and the Grand Prix de l’Académie française (2019). Her works have been shown in multiple retrospectives in Paris, including a week-long one last month. She has been the subject of a movie (Woman with a Camera by Zohar Behrendt, 2023) and now of a book (Filmer la Parole, 2025).

This tribute, the fruit of a collaboration between the Fordham University Center for Jewish Studies, the Primo Levi Center, and the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, is the first of its kind in New York City. It will gather Aviv’s long-time fans, newcomers to her work, and lovers of language from all backgrounds to celebrate through images and words this exceptional director as she turns 80.