Filmmaker First, Writer Second: How a children's book published at age 11 predicted everything that followed
By Matan Tal
This is a loose English translation of a short television piece that aired on Israeli news in 2003, during Book Week — an annual national celebration of reading and publishing. I was eleven. I had just published my first book. The reporter came to our house in Rishon LeZion, pointed a camera at me, and asked me questions I had never been asked before. I answered them as honestly as I could, which is probably the only way an eleven-year-old knows how to answer anything.
The book was a children's adventure story about a boy named Matan who goes searching for his younger brother Oded, who has wandered off into a strange land. I told the reporter I had dreamed the idea — that I had been going through what I called, with complete seriousness, a "creative crisis," and then one night the story came to me in a dream and I knew it could be something. I had written 46 books by that point, starting at age five. This was the first one anyone outside my family would read.
Before the book came out, my friends had made fun of me for it. After it came out, the same kids started being nicer. I noticed that. My mother said she pushed to publish it simply to strengthen me — to connect me to myself, to give me a kind of validation. I remember thinking that was a good reason, and also that I didn't really need an explanation. The book existed now. That felt like enough.
"In the morning I'm a filmmaker, in the evening I'm a writer."
The reporter asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said: a filmmaker and a writer, in that order. Filmmaker first, writer second. She asked if I was sure. I said: in the morning I'm a filmmaker, in the evening I'm a writer. I don't think I was performing confidence — I genuinely couldn't imagine it otherwise. Rika Berkovich — the late Israeli children's book author, and my mentor — was there that day. She acknowledged on camera that it made no economic sense, then said it anyway: this child is going to be a writer. The filmmaker part, I think, she took as given.
I'm writing this from Berlin, where I've lived for the past seven years. I make essay films. I also write — about cinema, about form, about the filmmakers whose work shaped how I think. The order has held: filmmaker first, writer second. Mornings and evenings, more or less. The eleven-year-old on that tape knew something, or at least was paying close enough attention to his own instincts to say it out loud on television without flinching. I find that I keep coming back to him — not with nostalgia exactly, but with something more like recognition. He was already working out the same questions I'm still working out now. He just had fewer words for them.
The reporter closed the segment with a joke: they said it was probably bad economics to publish a child's book. Then he said — well, we just ran a free advertisement for it on national television, so maybe not. I remember laughing at that. Some things about how attention works haven't changed much since 2003.
