04.07.2009
Michael Shvily, Co-President and founder of SHOVAL wins a Life Achievement Award for his great contribution to the to the cinematic culture in Israel, in the Grand Openning of the Jerusalem Film Festival.
Cinema Paradiso is only a glimpse at the life story of Michael Shvily, the Jerusalemite producer and film distributor, the most veteran in all of Israel.
By the age of ten, Shvily had earned his first money from the film industry, screening films with a magic lantern at school, and working as an assistant projectionist. He was
soon hired by the Arab owner of Jerusalem's Reeent Cinema. where he was responsible forchoosing films from the distributors in Tel Aviv After a number of years, he himself began renting and purchasing films for distribution across Israel.
One of the legends about Shvily's success is from his first trip as a young man to Cannes. After walking around at the festival and seeing that the distributors and production companies didn't know him, he called over a waiter at the Carlton Hotel, where the big producers drink their coffee, gave him a handsome tip, and closed his first deal at Cannes. Over the course of the next two days, the waiter called out every five minutes: "Mr. Shvily of United Shvily Films, you have a telephone call..." The next day, when he appeared for meetings, Shvily was welcomed by these bigwigs, as if they had known him for years.
Shvily, a master of advertising and public relations, held a premiere screening on a boat out at sea, invited his viewers to participate in lotteries and competitions, and always brought the stars and directors of his films for premiere screenings. This is how we met Alain  Resnais, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Fanny Ardant, and many others.
In 1967, Shvily produced his first film, Six Days to Eternity, released 10 days after the end of the war, gaining unprecedented success. Later he produced many movies along with a new director, just arrived fromIran, George Ovadia, who appeared in his office with the idea to produce a Persian film - in Hebrew. Shvily answered with "Shooting will start next week!"and so it was. Over the course of his career, Shvily produced
many films in which a long line of actors made their first steps.
Alongside the commercial films, Shvily was also responsible for bringing to Israel a respectable list of quality films like Miracle in Milan, The Bicycle Thieves, The Shoe Shiners, The Wooden Clogs, The Piano Teacher, 8 Women, Cinema Paradiso. Good Woman, and hundreds more films that had commercial success and have been written in the books of cinema history in Israel and around the world.
Shvily's film library emphasizes his dedication to quality cinema and includes the best of filmmakingng of the last 110 years. Among others you can find there the films of Charlie Chaplin. Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, the Taviani brothers and Akira Kurosawa.
Today Shvily provides hundreds of broadcast hours to the television channels, represents production and distribution companies in Israel and around the world, and is set to produce two international films.
For his life, which he has dedicated to the cinema with love and great enjoyment, for his great contribution to cinematic culture in Israel, we wish to thank Michael Shvily and award him this Life Achievement Award
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