Youtuber Turned Filmmaker Goes To The Oscars

In 2013 I met Dylan Joseph Schitrit at a friends rooftop in Tel Aviv; what in retrospect would turn out to be one of the most drunken summers of our lives, a stereotypical youthful friendship borne from a shared arts school experience, students with honed social skills and awareness and meticulously maintained social network presence. Approximately around the same time, he becomes one of the first most popular youtubers in Israel.

Still Photo from the movie "The Sun Rises Down Below"

In 2021 I meet him again in an obscure coffee shop on Dizengoff street following his first win for “The Sun Rises Down Below”, a 16 minute short (Open for viewing this weekend), at the 38th Jerusalem Film Festival with a view to the Academy Awards. He is now 22. He has erased his YouTube past and he is still the only one who calls me Hazan.

Schitrit studied at the Arison elementary school of the arts, from there he continued to Thelma Yellin, and contrary to the usual path of enlisting in spokesmen positions at the Israeli military, he enlisted in the paratrooper brigade during which in COVID times he wrote the script for his winning film “The Sun Rises Down Below”. When I ask about the decision he explains- “I think it’s problematic to mix the Arts with propaganda. There is a lot of knowhow and experience to be acquired which can be very enriching. But I felt I needed to leave my comfort zone and my city during my military service. I wanted to experience other things. It was dark and difficult. But in retrospect I am happy to have done it. I have a different perspective. Life in Tel Aviv goes on, which is also reflected in the film”.

Schitrit addresses Jenny and Rona, characters in his film who are loosely based on somewhat known street women in central Tel Aviv. The other characters in the film, hipsters with a dedication to self absorbed Instagram photography and a penchant for night life, he admits are based on his peers and generation “it’s definitely us, young Tel Avivians; a generation so busy with themselves, so busy with projecting an image of themselves without dealing with internal content and issues, only with how things look from the side.”  They are constantly photographing one another and whilst one of them says “I know that you are at your best right now” the other is busy photographing a package from the Bakery.

On the movie set. "The Sun Rises Below" (Photo: Harel Ben Melekh)

The film paints a tangible portrait of young life in Tel Aviv, personifying our lives with precision. The rooftop setting which has a meaningful place in the film for instance, reminds us of the rooftops we frequented in our adolescence, the same venue where Dylan and I first met. It had a concrete ledge with an extended surface which enabled us to jump if we wanted to scare newcomer friends who joined our crew.

In the film, Dylan’s father, a builder by profession, was recruited to build an external ledge like this to enable the filming of the building, inwards.

 It turns out that to the unfamiliar eye, this seems far-fetched. “I got all kinds of reactions about how much this looks staged and theatrical” says Schitrit. “Some shied away from it because it seemed fake to them, the detachment of girls in bathing suits. But picnics on a concrete rooftop is something that seemed natural to me. That’s the nature of Tel Aviv. On top of your building is a place that is semi private and it belongs to you – you feel a sense of ownership over it since you grew up there.”

Dylan created this film with his friends, a clique of young film graduates trained by Thelma Yellin and Ironi Alef high schools, who all volunteered. “As I was writing, I already began looking for people, but I didn’t have money to produce anything” he says. “I reached out to Blue Dobrecky, the cinematographer, we studied together and had already worked together on many projects in our highschool film department. He is a visual genius and a maverick musician. A friend connected me to Harel (Ben Melech, the Producer). Everyone came together and volunteered for the film out of love for filmmaking and the desire to create something.

Dylan Shitrit as a 13 year old youtuber (Photo: Hadar Hazan)

The cast, the actors, amongst them Ori Yaniv who has film and TV mileage under his belt signed up for an independent film of a 22 year old. “I sent him the script through Facebook and he answered me ‘ok, I really like this, let’s do it’ and I thought to myself ‘ok, you got it, I guess.”

In order to fund the production, Dylan used his military funds for all three days of guerilla filming, and an additional six months that amongst other things Schitrit worked on an original and impressive music score with Guy Kaira and Eddie Gerzen from the jazz department of Thelma Yellin. The team managed to create a precise and relevant film which made its way to Israel’s leading film festival and won its top award. “The film thrives on its own superficiality and the deeper idea comes from understanding it in its entirety, the contrast between ‘up above’ and ‘down below’ and to understand the portrait that is us. I think that all of the characters, including the street women are us, in a way, our generation, our city and our perception of it.”