Israel’s Sam Spiegel Among Top 15 Film Schools In Hollywood Reporter

The Hollywood Reporter, the prestigious US film, television and entertainment magazine, named the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School in Jerusalem among its annual list of top 15 best international film schools.

This is the third consecutive year the magazine has included the Jerusalem-based film school, the only school from Israel featured in the round-up.

The school’s founding director Renen Schorr will be stepping down in November-December, having completed The Jerusalem Trilogy, a three-part feature series in which graduates revisit short Israeli films made in the 1960s when Israeli cinema was in its infancy. The films are made with top alumni and will be screened at locations around the world including New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Toronto Cinematheque and the Barbican Centre in London.

Founded in 1989 by the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture and the Jerusalem Foundation, the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School, formerly known as the Jerusalem Film and Television School was renamed to honor the Oscar-winning producer of movies “Lawrence of Arabia” and “On The Waterfront” in 1996. The school boasts that its student films have won awards at top international film festivals like Cannes, Venice, and Berlin and 70 percent of its graduates secure jobs in the Israeli film and television industries. The institution was also the only Israeli film school to be included on the first-ever Variety magazine list of best film schools around the world.

Other renowned international schools featured on the Hollywood Reporter list include La Femis in France, the Munich Film School in Germany, NFTS in the United Kingdom, the Lodz National Film School in Poland and the Beijing Film Academy in China.