Keren Tzur | “These refined moments when everything is floating and precise are the reason I chose to be an actress”

(haipo) Keren Tzur is one of the most impressive and profound actresses in Israeli culture. A theater, television and film actress, director and lecturer in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Haifa. Her resume includes dozens of plays and films, complex roles, award-winning works and a stage presence that manages to touch the emotional edges of the human experience.

Alongside her rich artistic career, she is also a mother of three, aged 19, 16 and 10, married to an Israeli, and connected with every fiber of her being to Haifa despite moving to Tirat Carmel.

Keren Tzur is currently in the United States, representing Israel in the feature film “Independence,” directed by Moshe Rosenthal (“Karaoke”), which was accepted into the prestigious Sundance Film Festival and will premiere there. Just before her departure, Tzur gave a special interview to “Hai Pa” in which she spoke honestly about the state of acting, cinema, and culture in Israel, the challenges and complexities of local creation, and the personal feeling of being an Israeli actress working and creating in a charged but also inspiring reality.

“I grew up in Haifa my whole life,” she says. “We were on missions for a few years, and four years ago we temporarily moved to Tirat Carmel, but I am a Haifaite at heart. My family is here, my husband is from Haifa, and this city is an inseparable part of who I am.”

From high-tech to the stage – a brave choice

Keren Tzur's path to the world of acting was not an easy one. After her military service, she studied communications and political science at the University of Haifa. Upon graduation, she worked for six years as a programmer at Amdocs and, at the same time, out of a passion that never let up, she studied acting in the theater department at the University of Haifa from 1999 to 2001.

“I’ve always loved acting,” she says. “But there was always the fear: Is this a real profession? Can you make a living from it?” The fear, she admits, was justified: “It’s an unstable profession all over the world, and especially in Israel. The salary from one film doesn’t last you a year, you have to constantly chase the next project. The market is tough, there are a lot of talented people and very little support for creativity.”

Still, in 2004 she made a fateful decision: to leave high-tech and choose acting full-time. She joined the Beit Lessin Theater and began appearing in a long line of roles, a decision that turned out to be a brave and accurate move.

“The moments that justify the profession”

After many years on stages and sets, what was the moment when you knew that this was what you were made for as an actress?

“There are a few special moments of distillation in this profession,” she explains. “Moments when you are completely here and now, floating between yourself and the work. It can happen on stage or in front of a camera, when everything connects, when everything is precise. These are the most beautiful moments for me.” This thrill, it turns out, does not only belong to the stage. Keren Tzur teaches theater at the university, and there too she finds deep meaning: “When a student suddenly understands something deeply and brings a real and beautiful moment, it is that same level of happiness. These are the moments that justify this profession.”

Roles that require courage

Was there a role or moment that required special courage or deep exposure from you?

“There were a few of those,” says Tzur. “I don’t think there was a role that revealed something to me that I didn’t know about myself, but there were definitely roles in which I brought familiar sides to the extreme, in their full power.” Thus, she says, her last role in the film “Independence” was that of a woman who outwardly radiates confidence and control, while deep feelings of insecurity are surfacing beneath the surface. “It’s a very exposed place to be, to agree to show this gap.”

In her role alongside Oded Gottlieb in “Anders,” Tzur also touched on a particularly fragile and personal place. “There I brought the feeling of foreignness, the feeling of someone who hasn’t lived here continuously. It’s a feeling I know well, I knew how to connect with it and activate it on stage.”

One of the biggest challenges, she said, was playing the role of the fighter pilot in the award-winning solo show “Grounded.” “It required a completely different kind of courage, high physical ability, but especially emotional totality. This is a woman who completely identifies with her desire to kill the enemy, until the moment she sees her daughter on the screen. There is a moment of collapse there, of a blurring between reality, battlefield, and imagination. These are moments that require the actor to reach very deep places and surrender to moments of madness.”

“In each of the characters,” concludes Tzur, “I touched on the edges of human behavior, and that, for me, is where the real challenge and beauty of the profession lies.”

Theater as a space for discourse

In Tzur's view, the role of theater these days is more important than ever, yet it is not being sufficiently realized. “There is too little room today to hear different opinions and have a real discussion,” she says. “Not a discussion of right and left, but a sincere, open discourse that listens to the different sides. We have reached a time when we neither talk nor listen.” Art, in her opinion, should enter exactly this place: “Culture is not just entertainment. It uplifts the soul, allows a person to be moved, to think, to go through a deep emotional experience. We are moving away from this or it is difficult to maintain it in today's world.”

The Haifa crowd – a thinking community

As someone who has lived and worked in Haifa for many years, Keren Tzur has a special connection to the local audience. “You can’t generalize an Israeli audience,” she emphasizes. “The Tel Aviv audience is different from the southern audience, and the Haifa audience is a world in itself.”

According to her, this is an intelligent, thinking audience, one that can and should be challenged. “When we talk about coexistence here, it’s not a slogan. It’s our daily reality. We live in a unique human fabric and from a human perspective, it’s an amazing community.”

A look at Carmel Castle and the future

She speaks of Tirat Carmel, where she currently lives temporarily, with love and hope: “There is a special human fabric here, a gathering of exiles, many young people. There are cultural initiatives from the municipality and the mayor, but a significant cultural center is still missing. I believe that this will be created.” She also does not ignore the environmental differences: “As someone who was an environmental activist in Haifa, it is difficult for me to say this, but the air in Tirat Carmel is better.”

A message to the next generation of actors

One of the important messages that Tzur wants to convey is that there is no need to leave Haifa to study acting. “We have a theater department at Haifa University, an excellent department head, and big dreams. I hope we will delve deeper and open a significant acting school here. You don’t have to go to Tel Aviv to become an actor.”

And in life itself? “I am both a mother, a teacher and an actress. Balance is critical. Maintaining balance is sanity and it is necessary to survive in this profession. This is my path.”

Israeli Pride – From Sundance to the World

These days, the Tzur Foundation is at the height of excitement: the film “Independence,” in which it participates, has been accepted into the official competition of the Sundance Film Festival, one of the most important and influential film festivals in the world. Out of more than 16 films submitted, only 12 were selected, and “Independence” is the first Israeli feature film in a decade to be accepted into the festival.

“It’s a great privilege,” she says. “Especially in such complex times. Israeli cinema makes soldiers, and we have impressive creators of whom we can and should be proud.”