A celebratory project for the country’s 75th anniversary. The Israel Broadcasting Authority’s 19-episode documentary series, which was created by Yigal Lucin, was broadcast for the first time in the early 1980s in black and white and brought, based on unprecedented archival and historical research, the story of Zionism from the awakening of Jewish nationalism in 1896, to the establishment of the state in 1948. The series included hundreds of rare archive pieces, collected from various archives and private collections in Israel and around the world, and about 250 interviewees from Israel and abroad
In honor of the 75th Independence Day, the signature episode of the series – “We hereby announce the establishment of the State of Israel” was colored and updated, in which the events of the establishment of the state are presented. For the re-production, leading experts from Israel and the world were recruited. The original film film was rescanned, frame by frame, in high resolution and the film sections first went through a rigorous restoration process that included cleaning and digital sharpening. These are about 80-year-old films that came from many sources and were preserved under different conditions. Some of them suffered from flaws already in the original broadcast in 1981. After that, a visual investigation began that included going over all the archival materials appearing in the film, locating their archival source and the location where they were filmed. Much effort was invested in locating relevant color details for coloring the archival materials. For this part of the process, the original producer of the series, Jacob Eisenman, was recruited, who went through the original sketchbooks of the series. Eisenman shed much light on the materials and their origins. Each shot in the film is disassembled into its components
The coloring process of the film was carried out by a French company (Composite Films) which has shared experience with the corporation in renewing archives in projects of this type, such as in the film “Eichmann – The Lost Recordings” and the series “The Mandate”. At the same time, the original soundtrack, edited in mono (single channel), was A process of separation, cleaning, refinement and splitting into channels. The original music composed by Shem Tov Levy was on the film in poor quality and very compressed. It was brought back from the original recordings and combined at maximum quality
The 19 episodes of the series were broadcast for about five months during the winter and spring of 1981 on Israeli television, and since then many times in rebroadcasts in different frames. The series was produced for almost a decade and is considered a milestone in documentary work in Israel and one of the masterpiece series of public broadcasting for generations
