Filmography
Matan Tal
My films move between documentary, essay, and narrative fiction. Rather than treating cinema as a fixed genre system, I use each film to examine a specific question—about family, ideology, memory, authorship, or the boundary between art and life. What follows is a chronological map of my work.
Click on the film's name to see further details and even watch it.
My Sister Shira (TBA, 18 minutes)
Documentary
My Sister Shira is a documentary film about my sister and about growing up alongside her without knowing she was disabled at all. Shira has Williams syndrome, a condition often described as the “love syndrome,” and the film follows her decision to undergo a surgery while I document and reflect on our shared childhood. Half of the film observes the present moment; the other half is a return—fifteen years later—toward memory, perception, and the strange intimacy of siblinghood. For me, this film marks a shift toward filmmaking as an act of responsibility and giving rather than self-definition.
The Herzl Room (2023, 6 minutes)
Documentary / Web & New Media
The Herzl Room is a playful essay film filmed during a stay in the hotel room once occupied by Theodor Herzl. The film asks whether people and places can be connected forever—and what it means when ideology outlives the body that produced it. By inhabiting the space irreverently—dancing, eating, smoking, narrating from within—I examine reverence, ownership, and historical memory through humor and deliberate anarchy rather than solemnity.
Peter-Altenberg-ing (2021, 6 minutes)
Documentary
Peter-Altenberg-ing is a short documentary essay built around wandering, observation, and identification with a literary figure. The film reflects my interest in minor gestures, fragments, and states of being rather than narrative resolution. In my own filmmaking practice, this work sits between portrait and self-portrait, using a historical figure as a way to think about idleness, attention, and the act of drifting through a city.
David Lynch: The Virtual Life (2020, 13 minutes)
Documentary
David Lynch: The Virtual Life is a documentary essay examining David Lynch’s online presence and his use of the internet as a daily artistic practice. Rather than approaching Lynch through biography or analysis of his films, I focus on how authorship, ritual, and persona translate into a digital space. The film reflects my broader interest in how canonical figures adapt—or resist—new media environments.
The Invention of Chris Marker (2020, 14 minutes)
Documentary / Web & New Media
The Invention of Chris Marker is an essay film about authorship, disappearance, and self-mythology. The film explores how Chris Marker constructed himself through fragments, masks, and mediated presence, and how that construction continues to shape how we understand essay cinema today. When I made this film, I was less interested in explaining Marker than in tracing how an artist invents himself across time and technology.
The Same Snowy Ground (2020, 43 minutes)
Documentary
The Same Snowy Ground is an essay film about ghosts, absence, and places with an eternal past. I made this film while traveling through Eastern Europe, visiting locations shaped by historical loss and destruction. Nothing was scripted; I filmed intuitively and wrote the narration afterward, trying to make sense of what I had seen. In my experience as a filmmaker, this work represents an attempt to film the unfilmable—to give cinematic presence to what is no longer there.
Medea (2018, 11 minutes)
Narrative Fiction
Medea is a short narrative fiction film I made at a breaking point in my life, after being rejected six times from film school. The film explores the collapse between art and reality by following an actress whose desire to play Medea gradually turns her own life into a tragedy. When I was making Medea, I was driven by anger, urgency, and independence, and by an old philosophical question: does life shape art, or does art shape life?
Mildness (2018, 3 minutes)
Narrative Fiction
Mildness is a student film I directed in Venice. It’s a short, playful romantic comedy with no dialogue, driven entirely by soundtrack and visual rhythm. I didn’t write the script for this film — my role was purely as a director — and I approached it as an exercise in re-visualizing Venice and its cinematic romance through tone, movement, and timing rather than story or dialogue. For me, Mildness was a light, joyful project, a way to engage with the clichés of romance and place without irony, and to explore how much narrative can be carried by sound and image alone.
The Death of Romain Rolland (2017, 6 minutes)
Narrative Fiction
The Death of Romain Rolland is an early narrative fiction film that reflects my interest in historical figures, intellectual legacy, and imagined moments. Looking back, this film marks an early stage in my engagement with cinema as a way of thinking through history rather than illustrating it.
On continuity
Although these films differ in form and scale, I don’t see them as isolated projects. Together, they form a continuous inquiry into memory, authorship, ideology, family, and the porous boundary between life and art. Each film poses a question—and creates the conditions for the next one.
Viewing & programming
All films are available online, and several are screened in curated or conversational contexts.
For screenings, programming, or discussions, you can contact me directly.
