Yachin Hirsch has been living and breathing cinema for the last fifty years, as a cinematographer, director, teacher, and critic. Since he returned from his studies in New York at the end of the 1950s, he has recorded the Israeli experience with the eye of an artist, in dozens of documentary and fiction films, long and short, as cinematographer and/or as director. Films such as The Patrol directed by Micha Shagrir, The Dress, by Judd Ne'eman, Woman in the Other Room by Yitzhak (Tzepel) Yeshurun, and parts of David Perlov's Diary, are typical examples of Yachin's artistic contribution as a cinematographer to the development of cinema in Israel.
Yachin shoots cinema. He is also considered one of the greatest still photographers working in Israel. His
impressive works with his wife Ziona Shimshi documenting the memorial of the horrors in Paris in the Second World War, or the series Living Space, or his series on the nuns of Ein Kerem, are just a few examples of an oeuvre that has been etched over the years on the burgeoning culture of the first decades of the State.
Yachin is actively involved in the local art world-in particular in the fields of painting, sculpture, and poetry.
His independent works and those made in collaboration with David Avidan, David Perlov, Judd Ne'eman, and others, or his documentation of leading artists from the 1960s onwards, immortalize an artistic dialogue and have created a unique aesthetic over the years in which Israeli art has made its distinct local statement, after many years of works by immigrant artists, whose local art still drew from other, distant places.
We are proud to present Yachin Hirsch with the Festival's Life Achievement Award; an artist with
a unique talent and a sharp eye; humane, lyrical, poetic, his works are an important element in Israeli
culture.