Freedom Fighters of Nili Synopsis
The Freedom Fighters of Nili tells the true heroic tale of a group of Ottoman Jews from Zichron Ya'akov during WWI. While sacrificing their reputations within their community for the prospect of freedom and for the promise of a Jewish homeland, the group spied for the British. These brave people were known as the "Nili spies." Their story will be documented with interviews with historians and descendants of NILI members, photographs, archival footage, modern day local footage and personal letters, tracing their steps towards freedom.
Freedom Fighters of Nili Cast and Crew
Leora Chai
Director, Producer, Writer
Born in Afula, Israel. Leora grew up in Israel and the United States, and is bilingual. She began making short films in high school and has been working in the film industry for the past 10 years. After graduating from Full Sail University’s Film Production Program, she briefly lived in Los Angeles, where she worked on several independent films and TV award shows in the production department. She founded the Tambay Film Festival in 2001 in Tampa, Florida.
Leora has directed, produced and wrote Walk of Legends, a feature documentary candidly portraying the history of stock car racing in the United States. It was her first endeavor as a producer and director. She directed, produced and wrote the award winning independent narrative feature film, Speedland, which has been screened at film festivals in the United States. She has worked, in production, on several big-budget films including, Talladega Nights with Will Ferrill.
She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina – Charlotte and has a BA in Communication with an emphasis in International Public Relations. Currently, she resides in Tampa, FL.
Jonathan Geva
Director of Photography
Raised in Kiryat Yovel Jerusalem, Jonathan began to shoot movies at age ten with a home video camera. He continued to make movies in high school and was a video/ film photographer in the Israeli army. Later, in college he pursued business administration and economics, but soon realized it would be best to follow his passion and study film at Tel Aviv University. Currently, he directs and produces commercial advertising videos and is working on his first full-length feature film.
Dr. Matthew Hughes
Advisor/Historian
A graduate of SOAS and the LSE, Dr Hughes completed his PhD in War Studies at King’s College London. Dr Hughes is Hon. Editor of The Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research and has been a research fellow at the American University in Cairo and Tel Aviv University, and a British Academy funded research fellow at the American University of Beirut. Dr Hughes teaches modules on Total War in the Modern Era, the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the First World War. He is a qualified teacher with a PGCE (History) from Cardiff University.
From 2008-10, Dr Hughes is the Maj-Gen Matthew C. Horner Chair in Military Theory at the US Marine Corps University. Dr. Hughes’s research interests include Contemporary Military and International History; the First World War; the British Army; the Arab-Israeli Conflict; and the Palestine Campaign in the First World War. Several of his publications involving the Middle East during First World War are: Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East, 1917-19 (London: Frank Cass 1999) and (eds.) Allenby in Palestine: the Middle East Correspondence of Field Marshal Viscount Allenby, June 1917-October 1919 (London: Army Records Society 2004). He is the recipient of many fellowships and grants from Britain and abroad and has lectured at major universities and institutions around the world. He is also a consultant for the BBC History Magazine.
Dr. Ronald Florence
Advisor/Historian
Ronald Florence is a historian and novelist. Educated at Berkeley and Harvard, where he received a PhD in French and German history, he has written on the Gypsy holocaust, the Damascus Affair “blood libel” accusations against Jews, the building of the great Palomar telescopes, political assassinations, Marxist women, and most recently, the tangled origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Before turning to full-time writing, he taught at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College, and SUNY; was a senior researcher at the Century Foundation; and was executive director of the New York Council for the Humanities. He travels extensively in Europe and the Middle East to research his books, including recent visits to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Turkey for his newest book, LAWRENCE AND AARONSOHN: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
DORON AARONSOHN
Co-Producer
Born and raised in Israel and later spent time in London, UK and Maryland, USA. He returned to serve in the Israeli Air Force as an Air Traffic Control officer and stayed on a few additional years beyond his normal mandatory service and reached the rank of captain.
After the army, Aaronsohn earned a degree in Film and Television Production from Tel-Aviv University. Since film school, he has worked on several films and commercials that landed him a position as a producer with an Israeli production company called MiaCulpa.
Recently, he formed the company RePublik, a production and distribution house - producing video content for the Internet. He resides in Tel-Aviv, Israel and has come on board as an associate producer for the documentary The Freedom Fighters of Nili. It only seems fitting that Aaronsohn acts as an AP, due to his experience and because his great grandfather was Aaron and Sarah’s sibling.
Dr. Ran Aaronsohn
Main Advisor
Dr. Ran Aaronsohn is a senior lecturer in Geography at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is a descendent of the Aaronsohn family. He has written several books and numerous journal articles about early Zionism. His research interests include colonizing processes in the 19tthe century (Jewish resettlements in Eretz Israel), rural geography (communes in North America, typology of rural settlements), Israel/Palestine during the modern period, and urban preservation.
Dr. Aaronsohn authored Rothschild and Early Jewish Colonization in Palestine (Magnes Press & Rowman & Littlefield) Jerusalem & New York, 2001, among many other publications.
Jaclyn Allmon
Web Master
Jaclyn Allmon earned a B.A in Electronic Media from the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University. She started her career in television as a Program Director for an education access channel in Charlotte, NC. Jaclyn's love for technology and design has since led her to a new career in web design at the Assisted Living Federation of America in Washington, DC. Jaclyn is passionate about the green movement and created the website Overtime for Change to encourage people to donate time and/or money towards organizations that improve our world.
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