Start-out sabras at this year’s Cannes

The Cannes Film Festival is in full swing, with significant Israeli representation.

This year’s 11-day festival, which began May 11 and ends May 22, will screen two Israeli full-length feature films as well as several other films made with Israeli support.

Competing in Cannes’s Un Certain Regard category are Eran Kolirin’s “Beyond the Mountains and Hills,” (Koliriin made the 2007 film “The Band’s Visit”) about an Israeli career soldier who feels unaccustomed to Israeli life as a civilian after he retires, and “Personal Affairs,” made by Maha Haj, a Palestinian director, about an aging Arab couple in Nazareth.

There are other films with Israeli roots. “Anna” is a 24-minute short by Or Sinai, telling the story of a lonely woman who seeks some human contact in her hot little desert town. It stars Russian-Israeli actress Yevgenia Dodina, who also plays a supporting role in Asaph Polonsky’s “One Week and a Day,” another Israeli film being shown at Cannes.

Starring Shai Avivi (recently seen in “Atomic Falafel”), “One Week and a Day” is about a grieving father who finishes the week of shiva for his son and instead of returning to routine as his wife urges him, gets high with a young, pot-smoking neighbor played by Tomer Kapon (familiar from TV show “Fouda”) and discovers, in the process, that life can still hold some surprises.

“One Week” is Polonsky’s first feature film, and the American-born director developed the film in the Sam Spiegel Film Lab, along with “Run” by Philippe Lacote and Nadav Lapid’s “The Kindergarten Teacher,” both former Cannes films.

The Film Lab is part of Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, launched in 2011 to bring young filmmakers to Jerusalem to work on their first or second full-length feature film. All participants work with top script editors, presenting finalized scripts at the pitching event held during the summertime Jerusalem Film Festival.

There are several other Film Lab graduates at Cannes this season, including “Apprentice,” the second feature film from Singaporean director Boo Junfeng. Junfeng participated in the Lab’s second season, alongside Academy Award winner Laszlo Nemes and his lab project, “Son of Saul.”

Lab graduate Lapid is at Cannes as a jury member at the Critics’ Week, bringing his new medium-length film, “From the Diary of a Wedding Photographer.”

That film features Ohad Knoll (“Srugim,” “Yossi and Jagger”) and is about a wedding photographer who married one bride, kills another and then returns home.