Duki Dror

Who is Duki Dror?

Duki Dror is a director, scriptwriter and a documentary filmmaker who deals with issues of migration, identity and displacement.

Dror’s parents fled from Baghdad in the early 1950s to Israel. In the newly established state they changed their Arabic family name Darwish, to the Hebrew name Dror. Prior to this, Dror’s father was a political prisoner in Iraq for 5 years. His story became the dramatic theme in Dror’s personal film diary My Fantasia which takes place in the family owned Menora factory between two Gulf wars.

Dror studies in UCLA and is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago. His graduate film, Sentenced to Learn, which tells the story of lifetime inmates in Illinois prisons, was screened in the Pompidou Center in Paris as part of an American Documentary retrospective.

After eight years in the United States, Dror returned to Israel to explore the politics of identities and to reveal the complexity of Israeli identity. Two films Café Noah, and Taqasim, exposed the art and work of musicians who immigrated to Israel from Iraq and Egypt during the 50’s.

In 1996 he made Radio Daze – the peculiar life of Rivka Solarsky, a radio-quiz-show-star, that became a critical reflection of the “consumer-craze” of Israeli society. In 1998 he collaborated with the Palestinian director – Rashid Mashrawi on “Stress” - an experimental documentary in two parts which brings out inner emotions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.