Duki Dror

Zadok "Duki” Dror (Hebrew: דוקי (צדוק) דרור; born 1963) is an independent Israeli filmmaker whose films explore issues of migration, identity and displacement. Zadok (Duki) Dror was born in Tel Aviv. In the early 1950s, Dror's parents fled from their native Iraq for the newly established state of Israel. When Dror's father was 17 he was arrested on charges of political activism and served five years in prison as a political prisoner. Upon his release, he was not allowed to stay in Iraq. After moving to Israel, the family changed their Arabic name, Darwish (Arabic for "wandering") to Dror (Hebrew for "freedom"). Dror studied film, theater, and classical studies in the United States at UCLA and is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago School of Film and Video. Dror's films are character-driven stories and deal with issues of identity, displacement and cross-cultural exchange. His film Sentenced to Learn (1993), 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. The story behind his parents' immigration to Israel and his father's story in particular is the central motif in Dror's personal film diary My Fantasia (2000) which takes place in the Dror's family-owned Menorah factory between the First and Second Gulf War. The history, culture and identity of Arab Jews has also informed a number of Dror's other work including Cafe Noah (1996), and Shadow in Baghdad (2013) about the disappearance of Baghdad's Jewish population and the story of Linda Menuhin's family. In 2010, PBS aired a special series of his documentaries. 2018 Imperfect Spies (Inside The Mossad, feature film version) 2023 Generation Turmoil (directed with Naftaly Gliksberg)