The Mute’s House is an intimate portrait of 8 year old Yousef (partially shot by Yousef himself), the only boy living in the No Man’s Land on the border of divided Hebron, a West Bank city with a long history of violence and pain.
The Mute’s House takes us on a kid-led visit through the streets of Hebron and places us inside of a story that is morally complex, richly textured and improbably joyful.
The film has garnered international attention and has won numerous awards since its US premiere at the 2016 Full Frame Film Festival.
Director Tamar Kay was born in Jerusalem and graduated The Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film & Television School in 2015, where she focused mainly on documentary directing and film editing. In addition to The Mute’s House, Tamar has directed a short fiction film and has edited numerous short films that were screened in many festivals and won awards, both locally and internationally. Currently she’s the editor of an Israeli documentary series which will premier in 2017 on the YesDocu channel. Parallel to her filmmaking, Tamar is as a lecturer at the Ono Academic College in Jerusalem.
Alesia Weston oversaw the yearly International Feature Film Program at the Sundance Institute for nearly a decade. During that time, she spearheaded the international Screenwriters and Directors labs in the Middle East (Jordan’s RAWI), India (Mahindra), South Africa and Turkey.She currently consults with festivals and film labs around the world, focusing on program design and the support of emerging filmmakers. The films she worked on include Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, Hany Abu Assad’s Paradise Now, Ben Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain, Andrey Zviagintsev’s Elena, Haifaa Al Mansour’s Wajda, Fernando Eimbcke’s Lake Tahoe, Gyprgy Palfi’s Taxidermia, among many others.
Producer Ariel Richter is an American-born Israeli producer and filmmaker. He graduated summa cum laude from The Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film & Television School’s Production Program in 2014. He has produced over a dozen films, including the feature-length documentary Footsteps in Jerusalem and has worked in a variety of key roles in the Israeli film industry, including as the Deputy Director of The Sam Spiegel Jerusalem International Film Lab (Son of Saul, One Week and a Day, The Kindergarten Teacher).
