Israeli filmmaker Renen Schorr, founder of the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School, died on Wednesday at age 72. The school he founded opened in 1989 and was a game-changer for Israeli cinema with alumni including Nir Bergman, Nadav Lapid, Tom Shoval, Talya Lavie, and Rama Burshtein over the last 35 years.
Schorr, born in Jerusalem in 1952, made his career alongside the fledgling Israeli film industry to become a prominent figure in its development.
Schorr’s best-known work is the 1987 drama Late Summer Blues. Set amid the 1967 Six-Day War, it follows a group of seven high school graduates in the last summer together before being conscripted into the Israeli army. The screenplay was inspired by Schorr’s involvement in the 1970 Senior’s Letter to Prime Minister Golda Meir, where a group of high school students questioned the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and declared they would only sign up for the draft if the government were committed to peace, as well as his experience as a journalist for the official army magazine during the Yom Kippur war in 1973.
In early 1989, he was approached by Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek and Jerusalem Foundation President Ruth Cheshin to build a film school in the city. Schorr recalled how locating the school in Jerusalem was controversial at the time, since Israel’s film industry was predominantly situated in Tel Aviv, and some of his film world acquaintances called him “a traitor.”
He ran the school for 30 years before passing down the CEO and executive director role in 2019 to current CEO Dana Blankstein Cohen. Schorr also created the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab in 2011.
The initiative created many award-winning films over the past 14 years including Laszlo Nemes’s Oscar-winning Son Of Saul, Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher, Antoneta Kusijanovic’s Murina, Philippe Lacote’s Run, Nadav Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher, Alvaro Brechner’s Mr. Kaplan, Burhan Qurbani’s We Are Young, We Are Strong, and Mikko Myllylahti’s The Woodcutter Story.
Schorr’s other achievements include being one of the founders of the Israel Film Fund in 1979; the initiator and advisor for the New Fund for Film and Television (1992); the engineer of the Gelfand Fund for Short Films (1996); the driving force behind Israel joining the European Film Academy (2001); the founder and chair of the Jerusalem Film Fund (2008); the founder of the Cinematheques in Herzliya and Holon (2007, 2008), and founder and director of the First Feature Fund for Sam Spiegel graduates (2015).
His filmography also includes After (1977), The Battle of Fort Williams (1981), A Wedding in Jerusalem (1985), The Loners (2009) and final work, Wake Up, Grandson – Letters to my Rebellious Rabbi (2023).
