Rona Soffer

Where to begin? Should I start with my car accident, occurring while I was a turbulent teenager, which suddenly changed everything I could think about body and life? Or simply by the fact I grew up as a rebellious young girl in Jerusalem, at the end of the last century?

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After the tough car accident I had, I lost my body while transforming myself to be solely a body. I had a very long rehabilitation process and while being a teenager I had to re-learn everything; How to talk, walk, breathe, rage, love and appreciate. But more than anything, I learned to strength of my embodied cognition, even though my body is quite different.

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After my rehabilitation, and following the understanding that life just begins now, I started with a deep breath. Then I went to study my Bachelor’s degree in theatre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which tickled my passion for knowledge and playfulness. Then I moved on to study film at Sam Spiegel Film & Television School, Jerusalem, where I discovered the magic of cinema. I created features, video-clips and documentary films, and I continued to study my master’s degree in film at The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television in Tel Aviv University.

Movies I created were featured and won several film festivals in Israel and worldwide, including Docaviv Film Festival, Palm Springs International Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival and more (Detailed in my filmography).

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In my art, I like to deal with disability, body and sexuality and the magic that happens when they are all combined. I also participated in a show made by “Clipa” Theater dealing with this issue; I created movies and wrote a lot about the subject. To me, the importance of viewing disabled people as sexual human beings projects on our vision of them as whole persons, and as real men and women living among us.

Lately I participated in an accelerator for disabled film directors, focusing on VR (Virtual Reality) cinema. A movie I created during the accelerator was screened at the Cannes Film Festival and received many praises. This new media allowed me to have a new path for creation and for the understanding that the ways to create movies, space and meaningful, social, political, alive and kicking expression are endless.

Today I live in Tel-Aviv, I work in advertising, I use my walking stick and I enjoy creating interdisciplinary culture and cinema, including the process of writing my own TV series. I enjoy body, disability and sexuality and I enjoy publically speaking about it (Link to Lectures).

In my lectures I talk about disability and sexuality as a force in this life, about the power of creation and cinema, rehabilitation and this crazy, ordinary life.