Stranger on the Screen: Israel, Migration, and Identity Part I: Screening of My Australia

Please join the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies and the Magnes for a screening and talkback of the film My Australia, by Ami Drozd. This screening is part of the Helen Diller Institute’s Fall 2025 Israeli cinema series, examining migration and its relationship to identity, belonging, and outsider status, as portrayed through Israeli cinema. This series is hosted by Israeli filmmaker and film professor, Aner Preminger, the Koret Visiting Professor in Israel Studies at the Helen Diller Institute.

Friday, October 3, 2025 | 12:00 – 3:00 pm

In person at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA

About the Film:
In a poor neighborhood in 1960s Lodz, Poland, 10-year-old Tadek and his brother are in a gang with a strong anti-Semitic bent. When they are arrested, their mother, a Holocaust survivor, has no choice but to reveal that though raised as Catholics, they are in fact Jews. Telling the younger boy they are going to Australia, the land of his fantasies, the family boards a ship to Israel. This tender and humorous drama is based on the filmmaker’s own experiences.

Aner Preminger, 2025–2026 Koret Visiting Professor in Israel Studies at the Helen Diller Institute, Film and Media Studies Department, UC Berkeley; Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Professor, Department of Film and Television, Sapir Academic College

If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at magnesprograms@berkeley.edu or call us at (510) 643-2526 with as much advance notice as possible.