Religious & Biblical Productions in Israel
Documentary films focusing on the history of Christianity, Islam or Judaism have never stopped attracting filmmakers to Israel, and religious and Biblical productions have been part of our work since 1998.
Sites We Cover
We provide access to Biblical and religious sites across Israel and the Palestinian territories — Christian, Jewish and Muslim — from Jerusalem’s Old City and the Western Wall to Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, Bethlehem and the Dead Sea region.
Our Palestinian production team, based in Bethlehem, works alongside our Tel Aviv office on any production that needs access to sites in the Palestinian Authority areas.
Why This Work Matters to Us
Religious and Biblical documentary has been one of the steadiest threads in our production history since 1998 — not incidental work, but a genuine specialty built on relationships with the religious authorities, clergy, archaeologists and community leaders who control access to the sites these productions need. Very few production companies in Israel have handled as many of these projects, across all three faiths, over as many years, and that track record is what lets us secure access that a first-time visiting crew often can’t get on its own.
Christian productions typically follow the Gospels’ geography — the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Sea of Galilee and its surrounding churches, the Jordan River baptismal sites, the Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City. Jewish and Biblical-history productions often need the Western Wall, the City of David excavations, Masada, and archaeological sites tied to the First and Second Temple periods and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Islamic productions center on Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Haram al-Sharif compound, alongside sites in Hebron and across the West Bank.
Working With Religious Authorities
Every one of these sites is administered by its own religious body — the Greek Orthodox, Latin, Armenian and other Patriarchates for Christian sites, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation and Israel Antiquities Authority for Jewish and archaeological sites, and the Islamic Waqf for Al-Aqsa and the Haram al-Sharif — and each has its own process, restrictions and sensitivities around filming, especially during religious holidays and peak pilgrimage periods. We manage these relationships continuously, not just when a production needs them, which is why access requests we submit tend to move faster than a first approach from an unfamiliar crew.
Recent Work
In 2017 and 2018 we produced Weinachten in Bethlehem, a ZDF holiday musical concert and documentary filmed in the Church of Nativity, Bethlehem, and in 2023–2024 we produced “From Darkness to Light”, a video installation for the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem.