Udi Aloni (; born December 10, 1959) is an Israeli American filmmaker, writer, visual artist and political activist whose works focus on the interrelationships between art, theory, and action.
Biography
Udi Aloni is the son of Reuven and Shulamit Aloni. He has two brothers: Dror Aloni, who served as mayor of Kfar Shmaryahu and head of Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, and , an educational philosopher. He was married to Sigal Primor with whom he has a daughter, Yuli.
Art career
Aloni began his career as a painter, establishing the Bugrashov gallery in Tel Aviv, a home for contemporary art, cultural and political events. While living in New York in the 1990s, his work in large-scale art led him to invent a method for advertising on urban architectural structures.
Filmmaking career
In 1996, Aloni began making films. His documentary, Local Angel (2002), and his first feature-length fiction, Forgiveness (2006), are both radical interpretations of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that have stirred controversy in the Middle East and internationally. Aloni also directed Kashmir: Journey to Freedom (2008), a documentary about the nonviolent movement for liberation and freedom in Jammu and Kashmir that opened in the Berlin International Film Festival. Other films include Left (1996) and Art/Violence (2013), as well as Innocent Criminals (2004), a music video with DAM (band), Palestinian rap group.
Aloni directed and produced Junction 48, co-written by Oren Moverman and its star Tamer Nafar.
Aloni was the head cinema coach in the Freedom Theatre of the Jenin Refugee Camp. After the 2011 murder of Juliano Mer Khamis, the founder and head of The Freedom Theater, Aloni directed an Arabic adaptation of Waiting for Godot with the Freedom Theatre's graduate students, a production that toured to New York. Aloni wrote, directed, and produced the documentary Why Is We Americans?, focused on famed poet and activist Amiri Baraka and his son, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. The documentary was co-directed by Ayana Stafford-Morris, and features narration from executive producer Lauryn Hill. For the theme song of the documentary, "What We Want," Aloni produced a music video directed by Stafford-Morris, with Mayor Baraka delivering a passionate message of equality and justice.
Reception
Aloni's films have been presented at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Tokyo International Film Festival, the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, and the Jerusalem Film Festival. Forgiveness (2006), which took the audience award at the Woodstock Film Festival in 2006, was described by Slavoj Žižek as "maybe the most beautiful, powerful and important film ever made about the tragedies of the region." Its theatrical release in the United States opened with Mariam Said, the widow of late Edward Said, reading the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.
In 2007, Aloni was a Jury Member for the Manfred Salzgeber Award in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival in Berlin, Germany. His film Junction 48 received the Panorama audience award at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival.
Some of Aloni's films have drawn sharp criticism. Jerusalem Post movie critic Hannah Brown wrote of Aloni's film Forgiveness, "There isn't an award for the most pretentious and annoying movie ever made, but if there were, I'd put my money on Forgiveness. Writer/director Udi Aloni really does deserve some kind of prize for the energy with which he has melded tired cliches, smug pseudo-intellectualism and humorless far left-wing politics into a single movie."
The film Forgiveness (2006), which had its Middle-Eastern premiere in Ramallah, recently stirred up controversy when the Israeli embassy in Paris threatened to withdraw funding from the Israeli Film Festival in Paris (Israelien de Paris) should they open the festival with the film. Aloni (along with Naomi Klein, John Greyson, and others) was an initiator of the Toronto Declaration, a petition to protest plans to "host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv" because according to the petitioners doing so constitutes "staging a propaganda campaign" on behalf of "an apartheid regime.".
Published works
Aloni's book, What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters (Columbia University Press, 2011), includes conversations and comments by French philosopher Alain Badiou, philosophy professor Judith Butler, and philosopher Slavoj Žižek. The book spans the fields of theology and psychoanalysis, literature and philosophy.