By Avigayil Kadesh

This spring, Amit and Yael Shalev are taking their three kids on a half-year road trip to paint a multimedia portrait of life in the 64-year-old State of Israel.

 

Amit Shalev, a 40-year-old director and filmmaker, says he’ll strive for Family on the Road to be “intimate in feel yet epic in scope.”

 

Starting April 1 and traveling through late September, the quintet is live-streaming, filming, blogging and vlogging their way through kibbutzim, farms, cities, villages and settlements. They’re stopping to converse with religious and secular Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze, recent immigrants, sixth-generation citizens, musicians, authors, academics and scientists.

 

That’s a mighty tall order for an ordinary family. The cost of the video equipment and gas for their mobile home alone would be beyond their means.

 

Fortunately, the buzz generated by their ambitious project brought in a pledge of $50,000 from the Avi Chai Foundation (pending matching contributions). The Israeli Internet companies eWave and BumpYard are donating high-tech gear and a jeep to tow the family’s caravan from place to place, and will lend tech support.

 

“We thought to do a regular new media project, but then eWave and BumpYard said, ‘Why not use a totally cutting-edge format, making everything on Facebook? There’s no need to open an independent platform.’ So we’re building all our content on Facebook,” Shalev says. “That’s the best way to engage with the public and make it a public discourse. They can invite us to visit and comment as we go.”

 

Produced by Dani Chaimovitch and Arik Prince, the enterprise is independent, apolitical and not-for-profit. Israel’s Education Channel may air it. EL AL wants to screen the programs on its flights, and Israel’s largest cable TV provider plans to air daily footage. But Shalev wants above all to keep it real.

 

“We want to start fresh, as a regular family from Petah Tikvah, and let it grow naturally.”

 

 

Amit and Yael, with 10-year-old Odelia, six-year-old Albi and three-year-old Naomi, will start out from Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard at the Hall of Independence. Here the state was declared by David Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948, and here was the birthplace of last summer’s nationwide social protests. To Shalev, these bookend events lend meaning and immediacy to the project.

 

“The social protests of 2011 erupted all over the world and swept through Israel during the summer. Even more than the pursuit of economic benefits, they demonstrated a collective yearning for feelings of brotherhood and solidarity that have been forgotten over the past few decades,” he says.

 

“We believe that this burst of humanity is an expression of a deeper desire that is far more meaningful than a mere demand for lower housing costs. We could feel the awakening of a new aspiration -- sort of a young ‘old soul’ thriving on caring for others and mutual responsibility. We could feel that hope once again, fragile yet sincere, that has enveloped an ancient group of people that is currently living in Israel but has not finished searching for the shared dream on which it was founded.”

 

Shalev feels the Israeli people “are changing right before our eyes,” speaking differently and demanding more out of life – “a life of justice, harmony, balance and peace,” he says.

 

From Tel Aviv, the Shalevs will head south to Mitzpe Ramon; Nitzana to Eilat; back north along the Arava, the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley; around the Sea of Galilee; up to the Golan Heights and west into the Upper, Western and Lower Galilee; into the northern valleys, up Mount Carmel; and finally back to the center of the country and Jerusalem.

 

“We will spend our time in each destination as dictated by the content – in some more and in others less. The route will remain flexible and dynamic,” he explains.

 

“We have two friends helping with production, so that I can focus on filming, editing and all the family stuff. They’ll manage the back office and research, the comments and feedback from the public.”

 

Shalev’s plan is to upload at least one new high-quality clip daily, focusing on a special interaction or a dramatic scene. “The shorts will build a unique, mosaic-like picture of Israel in 2012.”

 

Audio and written text will be mostly in Hebrew, but Shalev plans to arrange for subtitling in English and perhaps other languages “so all our videos will be relevant for all viewers.” His own English is excellent thanks to a few teen years spent in Virginia, and then a post-army trip touring the United States.

 

 

The children will be home-schooled by Yael, 39, a kindergarten teacher and parenting group facilitator.

 

“The issue of education is an important one we want to explore, because we’re really concerned with the state of education and the way Israeli children are growing up, so we’ll go through different alternatives and meet with educators and people with solutions and ideas,” says Amit. “Maybe when we visit a Bedouin settlement, Odelia will spend a day with them in school and see how it goes.”

 

Odelia will keep a personal blog and she has a special project brewing through Matach, a Tel Aviv University-based content producer for the Ministry of Education.

 

“Odelia may interview school kids throughout our journey in short clips, from her point of view. I will help her with editing,” says her dad. “Matach will embed her clips and content regarding education on their site.”

 

Shalev will be responsible for the main journey log, live-streaming and uploading video fragments. “Not conventional clips,” he stresses, “but very dynamic and ‘fresh from the oven.’ If we’re visiting a family and have a moving scene, I’ll edit and upload it immediately. At times we’ll upload longer five-minute clips to sum up what we experience.”

 

Working in an authentic documentary style, the Shalevs hope to incorporate plenty of collective activities, such as cooking with an Arab family, pressing olive oil in a Druze village in the Galilee, picking dates on a kibbutz in the Arava desert, trailing a Bedouin mountain shepherd, toiling alongside a factory worker.

 

“Scenes will fluctuate between documentary action and deep interviews with simple people with a special story to tell or pop-culture celebrities, scientists and academics espousing a poignant viewpoint,” Shalev says. “For example, we plan to visit Amos Oz, Israel's renowned author, and hear his perspective on ‘Israeliness’ while referring to his 1982 groundbreaking book of essays, In the Land of Israel. Unpredictability will provide another layer to this journey through random encounters along the way, hitchhikers or late-night campfire chitchat.”

 

Shalev is eminently qualified to take on this ambitious project. He graduated with honors from the department of film and television at Tel Aviv University and for the past 12 years has worked as a director, editor and director of photography. He’s created documentary and fiction feature films, as well as Israeli TV shows, ad campaigns, commercials and music videos. He taught at two regional colleges and at Tel Aviv’s former Camera Obscura School for the Arts, Israel's most well-known address for avant-garde cinema and photography.

 

He envisions unfolding two parallel narratives as his family travels -- the development of the Shalev family through their encounters with other Israelis, and the encounters themselves.

“We will get to know them, ask questions, listen and generate a heartfelt, down-to-earth conversation around such questions as: What connects us? What separates us? What’s common to all of us? What is our biggest challenge? What makes you happy? What is most important to you? What is most important to all of us? What makes you special? What are you lacking? What is your dream? What should be our mutual dream? What would you change? What are you willing to take responsibility for?”

 

They already did a pilot run in order to test the viability of this approach. They met with Racheli Malsa, a single mother and social worker in Ramat Gan; Jawdat Ibrahim, an Arab Israeli restaurateur from Abu Gosh; Sharon Rotenberg, a homeopath living at Kibbutz Oren in the Carmel Mountains; and farmer Oren Solter, who jumped from his tractor in the Hefer Valley to share stories about his years in Uganda.

The Shalev family is on a journey to discover the real Israel (Photo: Ilan Golovy)

 

Ultimately, what do they hope to learn in this extraordinary journey?

 

“This is what I want to discover,” says Shalev, “What the people of Israel have that makes them the people of Israel.

 

“I wish for one thing to happen,” he continues, “to really acknowledge and bring to the public awareness that we are totally interdependent on one another and bound to live together in this place. And the only way to do it is to bridge gaps and mentalities and all kinds of self-centered paradigms that we live according to. We must start mutually and collaboratively working together with the recognition that we are one big family.”

 

In fact, this is exactly why he wanted to approach the project on a family level, he says. “The notion of family is on the one hand collapsing and on the other hand is firmly engraved in the human condition in such a way that it can serve us as a very nice metaphor. The reality is that we are setting out on a journey following that thin gossamer thread of brotherly love that has been binding us for millennia.”