- Adam Robinson*



Good evening. We interrupt this broadcast to bring you breaking news. A suicide bomb attack in Tel Aviv tonight has… Close your eyes. What do you see when you think of Israel? Do you see the wounded and panicked in the streets from CNN or BBC newscasts? People shouting in mobs? Do you picture young people paralyzed with grief and pain? Now, picture this: a live music bar called Mike's Place next to the beach in Tel Aviv.


http://media.www.theconcordian.com/media...

© St. Petersburg Times
published May 2, 2003

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TEL AVIV, Israel - A trio of filmmakers set out this month to show a slice of normalcy by making a film about their favorite Tel Aviv pub and its jam sessions.

Early Wednesday, as they filmed at Mike's Place, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance, killing two musicians and a waitress who was to be the film's central character.

The bomber had a British passport, the first time in 89 such bombings that a foreigner has carried out a suicide attack. The bar, near the U.S. Embassy, caters to foreigners.

One of the filmmakers, Jack Baxter, 49, from New York, suffered burns to his arms and remains in the intensive-care unit of a Tel Aviv hospital. The other two documentarymakers were left shocked, trying to figure out how to complete their project.

"It isn't safe. It isn't safe," the film's American-born director, Joshua Faudem, 27, said about life in Israel. "We'd like to believe that it is safe, and that's what we wanted to show."

Baxter had recruited Faudem, who was born in Detroit and immigrated to Israel, and his girlfriend Pavla Fleischer, 27, from Prague, Czech Republic, to make a film about the pub and its mix of travelers and locals seeking escape from the region's troubles.


http://www.sptimes.com/2003/05/02/news_p...

By Roni Singer

"The suicide bombing will be the middle of our movie. Before that will come the dream. It will be shattered by the bombing and then we will film `how to go on,'" says Josh Padam who is making a documentary about Mike's Place. Padam, who has lived here for several years, met his girlfriend, Pavla Fleischer, while they were studying film-making in Prague and she decided to join him in Tel Aviv two weeks ago.

"As soon as I came back to Israel, I decided to rejoin my `family' at Mike's. Gal, the owner, offered me work as a barman," he says. There Padam met another film-maker, Jack Baxter, an American who had come to Israel to make a film about the trial of Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti. "He decided there were already too many films about the trial, so he would make a movie about the pub," says Padam.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt...

Eva Cohen

What is it like living in a state of perpetual war and terror? This is the question that filmmaker Joshua Faudem and his colleagues attempt to answer about the life of Israelis in the 2005 release Blues by the Beach.

The documentary is set at Mike’s Place, a popular live music bar on the Tel Aviv beachfront. The bar was chosen because it could be a blues bar anywhere in the world; people laugh, dance and sing just like at a bar in Canada. This is a face of Israel that is unknown to most of the world, and therefore such a place was ideal to show how Israelis live beyond the blood and violence shown on TV.

Faudem worked at Mike’s Place in 2003 and he and his girlfriend from the time, Pavla Fleischer, were hired on as camera crew by American documentary producer and investigative journalist, Jack Baxter, to tell the story of present-day Israel.

The team worked together, filming the bar patrons, wait-staff and the general life of Mike’s Place. The viewer becomes familiar with the personalities at the bar.

http://www.afterword.ca/cgi-bin/afterwor...

By MEREDITH HERMAN
Special to The CJN

MONTREAL - Joshua Faudem, director of Blues by the Beach, a documentary about the 2003 suicide bombing at Mike’s Place, a Tel Aviv bar, says the editing process was the hardest part of making the film, since it forced him to recall the attack, which he witnessed personally

“Every time you go back into the editing room you have to re-live what happened that night,” he told some 200 people at a Nov. 23 screening of the film at the Paramount theatre. “It’s only when we finished editing the film that I had my closure.”

In an interview with The CJN, he described how making Blues by the Beach began largely by chance.

Jack Baxter, an American documentary producer and investigative journalist, decided to make a film about Mike’s Place as a Middle Eastern cultural oasis after becoming captivated by its unique vibe. Geared towards Americans and travellers, the bar made Baxter feel right at home.

Looking for a director, he hired Faudem – a budding young filmmaker himself who had been working there as a bartender while researching his own film, Russki Battalion – and they began documenting the happenings at the bar.

http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id...