We’ve all heard about the greatest films ever made. But what about the greatest films never made?
Tsvi Bokaer arrived in America from Tunisia, then Israel, carrying little more than a love of cinema so fierce it bordered on devotion. A Sephardic Jewish immigrant, father of six, and self-taught filmmaker, Tsvi spent decades writing screenplays, shooting footage, and filling notebooks with visions no one ever saw onscreen: a secret creative life hidden in plain sight, alongside a family that had no idea the depth of what he carried.
When his son Emile, himself a documentary filmmaker, begins excavating his father’s archive, what emerges is staggering: unproduced scripts with the ambition of Hollywood epics, personal footage that captures a vanishing world, and documents that trace a Tunisian Jewish identity almost entirely absent from cinema’s recorded history. The greatest films never made turn out to be a window into an entire culture rarely seen onscreen: generations of Tunisian Jewish American filmmakers.
In spontaneous, unguarded moments, Tsvi speaks directly to his son’s camera in Tunisian Judeo-Arabic. An endangered language becomes a cinematic inheritance.
We Play Cinema is a film about inheritance — what fathers leave behind, what sons go looking for, and what gets lost in the silence between them. It is also a film about the moving image as an act of survival: how a community dispossessed of land, language, and continuity poured itself into stories. And it is a love letter to cinema itself — to the belief, shared across generations, that the movies remain a place we go to live life fully.
Recorded across decades, continents, and generations, with Tsvi as both subject and unlikely co-author, We Play Cinema asks what it means to reach for the light of the screen, forever.
