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November 17, 2025

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2025-11-17

Hi, all! It’s been a while. There hasn’t been a whole lot to write about: no new wars, and the existing ones are in such a confusing state the Schrödinger's cat must be somewhere in the cardboard box of newspapers.

I’ve been working on my movie, ”dreamtext דברי חלום”, and I finally have something to show you.

The current version of the film is at an unlisted link on YouTube:

(You can also reach it at https://bit.ly/dreamtext-rc3 , which is easier to type.)

This is, I hope, the last test version. It’s the complete 82-minute film. I’m sending the link here to the newsletter, to my Facebook friends, and to a few others. I hope to release it to the public (for free) in December.

It’s been a long haul. I’ve been working on it for close to seven years.

I did have one cool moment a couple of months ago in making it. There’s a section that features the hands of women drifting over landscapes. We put out a call here at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers in the in-house magazine and WhatsApp group. A dozen or so residents gathered in a room on the ground floor that I’d mostly seen used as a bomb shelter, and I filmed their hands against a green screen on the table. (One new resident, who had won national awards in some of the business aspects of filmmaking, helped me position the hands and green fabric more effectively.)

It’s become primarily a film of dance, created (except for a moment toward the end) in a single take by the amazing dancer Cheryl Nayowitz.

There are text and voices in Hebrew and English, but you can just consider them to be sound and images if you don’t speak the languages. In several sections, you’ll hear voices speaking detached Hebrew words as the words appear on the screen. To create that, I asked the members of the Holon Scratch Orchestra to speak words, by stream of consciousness, related to the theme word of the segment: Dream, Desert, Dance, and Israel. In the “Voices” segment, where we see the hands, I combined all the words from the previous segments.

There’s no story. As the tagline says, it’s “a dream in dance of coming to life in Israel.”

I hope to release the final version in December. Please, if you can, take a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks, and Enjoy!
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