Think Popcorn (2004), Description of a Memory (2006), and Noise (2012) are indeed three separate films, yet together they form a single cinematic poem divided into three movements.

Each “movement” pays homage to a pioneering documentary filmmaker who, in turn, shaped the documentary voice of the twentieth century.

Think Popcorn sends a distant greeting to the Russian cinematic genius Dziga Vertov and to his eternal figure in The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). Description of a Memory engages intimately with the cryptic cinematic language left behind by the great French cinematic poet Chris Marker who during his visit to Israel in 1960 made the acclaimed film-essay: Description of a Struggle. Noise explores how, in a world that does not exist, British master-documentarian John Grierson and the French Jean Rouch, the founder of Cinéma Vérité school, might have joined forces to make a film in Tel Aviv if their imaginary protagonist had been born and lived there.

Each of the films adopts a narrative and stylistic approach inverted in relation to the other two: in Think Popcorn, the cinematic world of the protagonist is sculpted from his real-life encounters with actual people across Israel. Description of a Struggle converses with the alter ego of one who sets out to film his fractured, bruised homeland. Noise recounts the tormented inner world of its protagonist from the piercing and compassionate perspective of his life partner.
Compassion, sorrow, irony, self-deprecating humor, humility and hubris, love of cinema, and love of humanity—these are the leitmotifs threading through the three love songs to the documentary by Dan and Noit Geva.

If Israel is the raw material from which the trilogy is forged, then it is the land’s fragile hope—the very heartbeat and purpose of this cinematic journey—that the documentarian seeks to trace and unearth.