Synopsis  

As Israel’s most celebrated war photographer Micha Bar-Am mines his extraordinary archive of over half a million negatives, questions and self-doubt surface, in a profound exploration of photography, memory, and the personal cost of a life devoted to recording a conflict. 

For a year and a half, the acclaimed photo-journalist Micha Bar-Am allowed director Ran Tal to enter his vast archive of negatives. Composed entirely of images that Bar-Am took over more than fifty years, 1341 Frames of Love and War reveals the enormous price that comes along with documenting atrocities and wars.  "The most horrible things are sometimes aesthetic," says Bar-Am. 

1341 Frames provides an intimate portrait of an artist and a meditation on memory, violence and identity.  Beyond this narrative tribute, the film offers a unique cinematic, visual, and sensory experience that explores the relationship between sound and picture, and between movement and stillness, it explores how to imbue still photography with movement on the one hand, while freezing cinematic movement to distill meaning and emotion on the other. It is a complex love letter to the power, beauty and horror of photographic imagery.