Taliya Finkel

FilmVisual Arts

Taliya Finkel

Taliya Finkel is a multi-disciplinary artist, specializing in documentary cinema. Most of her work deals with the borderlines of identity and of belonging. She sees her personal experience as the primary basis of all that she create. For Taliya, every medium contains possibilities of documentation – photography, video, text. Therefore, everything she goes through in life may be used as rushes for her next film. The inner world is equivalent to the outer world and therefore merits documentation no less.
Taliya’s unquenched thirst for documenting people mirrors her ongoing quest to define her scope of existence. Who she is in relation to her family and lineage, to the religion she was born into and her obvious secularity. In “Over My Dad’s Body” her father’s inner world, forever mixed with the imaginary and the real is a parable to artistic creation and to the way in which she perceives the world through her camera or paintbrush. Spending entire days with her ultra-orthodox grandparents, who came from a place she never knew and suffered in a way she hopes she will never experience, helped Taliya redefine herself. As does the “Rabbanit” Kook, a staunch believer in a prophecy the world refuses to hear, such an extrovert enthusiast that she felt compelled to document her for two entire years as you can see in “Tikkun”.
It seems that art is often like a prophecy for the deaf and the artist a mad genius who has to march on with G-d as his only confidante. All her subjects are unique in a way, but in their different inner worlds she can often see myself. And that lead her on to finally document her own search for that thing called love. “Taliya.Date.com” was a way for her to simultaneously track down the man of her life and a way to expose her most inner insecurities. Taliya went on forty-five dates on a row. Some mad, some bad, some boring and some wildly amusing. At the end of this search, she did find it. That thing called love.
Since 2007 Taliya is married to Yehu Moran