Ilan Ziv (Director)

Jesus Politics

After fighting as an Israeli soldier in the 1973 war, and troubled by the nation's obsessive mixing of the Bible with politics, the filmmaker left for America, which he considered a "safe haven" because of its separation between church and state. Thirty-five years later, alarmed by the prominent role of religion in the 2008 American presidential campaign, he decides to make a road trip, to try and understand the phenomenon. Rather than follow the candidates, however, Ziv decides to meet with religious activists supporting the Democratic and Republican candidates. From the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries to Super Tuesday in Oklahoma, JESUS POLITICS shows the efforts of Baptist activists for Obama, Catholics and evangelicals for McCain, Christian conservatives for Huckabee, as well as the political efforts of evangelical organizations such as Christians United for Israel.

Release Date2008-10-28

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd

Dispatches

An in-depth look at news stories. Documentaries that take you behind the scenes giving an insight into people's lives or institutions.

Release Date1987-10-30

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Episode Count1

Vote Count13

The Long War: Iran, Israel, USA

Today, Israel and the United States are Iran's enemies par excellence. Their reconciliation seems impossible. Is the history of these three countries the chronicle of a war foretold, delayed for decades but inevitable?

Release Date2020-11-22

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Episode Count2

Vote Count5

The Junction

The Junction is an obscure crossroad in the Gaza Strip, separating the Israeli settlement of Nezarim from the Palestinian refugee camp of Nussierat. Ringed by a teeming Palestinian neighborhood, the Junction became a battleground in September 2000 when the Second Intifada erupted. The violence destroyed many lives there, Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers. Once a busy intersection and a flourishing neighborhood, it is now a desert. The film reaches far into the social fabric of both Israelis and Palestinians to explore the culture of death which both stems from and feeds the violence currently consuming both societies.

Release Date2004-05-14

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

Capitalism

Capitalism has been the engine of unprecedented economic growth and social transformation. With the fall of the communist states and the triumph of "neo-liberalism", capitalism is by far the world's dominant ideology. But how much do we understand about how it originated, and what makes it work?

Release Date2014-10-14

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Episode Count6

Vote Count5

People Power

An exploration of non-violence as the means to achieving social reforms, focusing on the downfall of Pinochet in Chile, the Palestinian Intifada, and Cory Aquino's "people power" revolution in the Philippines.

Release Date1989-11-09

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Litigating Disaster

December 3, 1984. Bhopal, India. The biggest and deadliest chemical disaster of all time. Nearly twenty years later the ordeal isn't over, justice has not been done. Had the disaster occurred in the developed world, heads would have rolled, prison sentences would have been served, changes would have been made. But the disaster didn't happen in the West, but in this obscure Indian city.

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Antisemitism

Director Ilan Ziv traces the origins of antisemitism in France from the Middle Ages to the Dreyfus Affair. Combining personal and collective narratives, Ziv showcases how the depiction of "the Jew" in society established an ideology of hate that eventually led to the Holocaust. In the aftermath of the war, a devastated France continued this ideology of antisemitism that set the stage for a modern wave of anti-Jewish sentiment and attacks, including the murders of Ilan Halimi and Mireille Knoll.

Release Date2020-01-28

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

Capitalism

CAPITALISM is an ambitious and accessible six-part documentary series that looks at both the history of ideas and the social forces that have shaped the capitalist world. Blending interviews with some of the world’s great historians, economists, anthropologists, and social critics with on-the-ground footage shot in twenty-two countries, CAPITALISM questions the myth of the unfettered free market, explores the nature of debt and commodities, and retraces some of the great economic debates of the last 200 years. The series features some of the world’s top economists, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, including Thomas Piketty, Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis, Nicholas Phillipson, Kari Polanyi Levitt, David Graeber, and Abraham Rotstein. - icarusfilms.com

Release Date2014-10-14

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Hijacked

Thirty-six years ago a new era in global terrorism was born. Just moments after lift-off on the morning of September 6, 1970, passengers on TWA's flight 74 from Frankfurt to New York were startled to hear an announcement over the plane's PA system: "This is your new captain speaking. This flight has been taken over by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine." Minutes later, travelers on another New York-bound plane, Swissair Flight 100, faced the same chilling reality. Featuring first-hand recollections from former hostages, flight crews, and their captors, Hijacked, an hour-long documentary from award-winning producer Ilan Ziv, tells the story of what would be known for more than three decades as the blackest day in aviation history.

Release Date2006-02-27

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Six Days in June

The shooting lasted on six tense days in June 1967, but the Six Day War has never really ended. Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades stems from those six fateful days.

Release Date2007-05-18

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

The March to War: Iran, Israel and the USA

As the first American and Israeli missiles hit Iran on February 28, 2026, U.S. government officials argued that this was not the start of war. Instead, it was just the next stage in a conflict that started with the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the American and Israeli-backed regime of the Shah, and made the U.S. and Israel sworn enemies of the new Islamic state. THE MARCH TO WAR is a unique three-part series that looks at the deep roots of the “infinite roller-coaster” of conflict that has ensnared Israel and Iran and drawn in the United States. Was open war inevitable, the series asks? And could the escalation have been stopped? The series tells the story through the voices of those that shaped it: politicians (including former U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu), military commanders, intelligence chiefs and ambassadors, from all sides, along with political scientists and historians.

Release Date2026-06-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Terrorism: After 9/11

How the war on terror launched by the Bush administration after September 11 has worsened the threat of terrorism.

Release Date2017-05-23

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Episode Count2

Vote Count2

Fire in the Andes

Since 1980 there has been a growing guerilla war in Peru. The Maoist Shining Path have been fighting special units of the Peruvian Armed Forces, who have been granted political as well as military control over many areas. The war has left over 5000 people dead or "disappeared." In January 1983, the violence in Peru was driven home to the world with the discovery of the bodies of eight journalists in the remote Andean village of Uchurracay. A government commission said the journalists were murdered by peasants who mistook them for guerrillas. Others charged military complicity.

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

An Eye for an Eye

A true story of hate, revenge, understanding, remorse and redemption as lived by Mark Stroman on the Texas Death Row.

Release Date2016-10-28

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count6

Library Wars: A New Front In America's Cultural Wars

Cultural wars have transformed politics in the US into identity politics dividing the electorate and calcifying political differences and party loyalties. For the past decades, abortion divided the country and the voters. Now it’s public libraries that have been transformed into the new battlefields in America’s cultural wars. How can one explain this seemingly sudden focus on books, in school and public libraries? What is behind this rise in censorship? This film follows four distinct stories that illuminate and explain the evolution of this newest battleground in America’s long culture war.

Release Date2024-11-13

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count2

State of Terrorism

Before September 11, 2001, only some 400 people had pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda. But now there are tens of thousands of jihadist militants on several continents. Terrorist attacks have multiplied around the world, straining relations between the West, its minority populations and Muslim nations. By violating the democratic values it claimed to be defending, the “War on Terror” launched by George W. Bush’s administration in the wake of 9/11 had the effect of a hammer smashing a vial of mercury. It scattered what had been a limited threat, turning it into a permanent global conflict – one that has provided fertile ground for recruiting jihadists and swelling the ranks of increasingly powerful xenophobic groups in the United States and Europe.

Release Date2022-09-03

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Attack of the Happy People

Ecstasy, which started out as a psychotherapeutic drug, acquired the reputation of a happiness pill and thus became one of the most consumed recreational drugs today. Wandering through X culture exposes some surprising links between the subculture of parties, wild sex, consumerism and religion. By pointing the camera on Israel 2003 – war, religious fundamentalism, consumerism and drugs - the film depicts a world in which reality and hallucination are constantly recreating each other in an inseparable and crazy path.

Release Date2003-01-01

DepartmentProduction

JobExecutive Producer

Exile: A Myth Unearthed

This feature documentary looks at new evidence that suggests the majority of the Jewish people may not have been exiled following the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Travelling from Galilee to Jerusalem and the catacombs of Rome, the film asks us to rethink our ideas about an event that has played a critical role in the Christian and Jewish traditions.

Release Date2012-12-07

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector