Departures of note

Ilan Moshenzon was an Israeli film director best known for his debut feature Rova Huliot (The Wooden Gun), released in the late 1970s and based partly on his own childhood experiences. The film, which depicts a street war between two groups of children in a Tel Aviv neighborhood around the third Independence Day, is regarded as one of the first feature films to deal extensively with the Holocaust. It represented Israel at the Berlin Film Festival, and its screenplay won the Shai K. Ophir Prize, later known as the Ophir Award. He later directed the 1986 feature Crazy Weekend (Sof Shavua Metoraf).

Born in Tel Aviv, Moshenzon grew up on Italian cinema and the French New Wave, citing directors such as Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Tati as influences. He studied history at the Hebrew University before turning to theater and cinema, and completed his film studies with distinction at the London Film School. In the early 1970s he worked as a staff director at Israel's educational television, writing scripts and producing dozens of educational programs, and served in the Israeli Air Force film unit during reserve duty.

Moshenzon was active in the Kitz group promoting quality Israeli cinema in 1977, whose efforts helped establish the Israel Film Fund. From 1982 to 1977 he directed and produced documentaries for the first channel. He taught cinema at Beit Zvi and, from 1991, lectured at Tel Aviv University for more than twenty years, where he co-founded and directed the master's program in film for graduates of other disciplines. He was married to Edna Ben-Ari, a senior curator at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.