Camtastic Newsletter February 2026
CAM Alumna Hilla Medalia earns prestigious Academy Award nomination
By Mark Stoffel, College of Arts and Media
When Hilla Medalia, a Tel Aviv native, came to SIU in the late 1990s on an athletic scholarship, she didn't imagine leaving as an award-winning documentary filmmaker just a few short years later. “I always loved film, but I didn't know that I wanted to be a filmmaker,” she said with a chuckle.
As a Radio-Television major, she joined AltNews – a student-produced TV magazine that covers unique human-interest stories, and immediately went to work. “The school really gave me the possibility to do more than just the homework for the class or the required curricular work,” she said.
Jan Thompson, director of the Charlotte Thompson Suhler School of Journalism & Advertising, herself a documentary filmmaker, said she had Medalia as an undergraduate student in her documentary course, and “I can’t tell you how proud I am of her!” she exclaimed.
Between the vibrant, creative atmosphere of the AltNews team and Professor Thompson’s steady mentorship, Medalia’s unbridled passion for creating powerful documentary films flourished.
Medalia graduated in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts in Radio and Television, then moved on to earn a master’s degree in “Professional Media Practice.” In the midst of her graduate studies in 2002, violence again flared up in Medalia’s home country of Israel. When a suicide attack at a market in Jerusalem killed two teenagers – the bomber, a Palestinian girl, and her victim, an Israeli girl - she decided to devote her master’s thesis to this tragic incident.
“That attack really had made an impact on her,” Thompson recalls, “and I said, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ She said, ‘I want to interview the parents. And I thought, ‘Oh yeah? How are you going to pull this off?’ This is before Zoom, before all of this technology that we now have at our fingertips. I said, ‘Well, let's first see if you can get a hold of them and find out if they would want to be interviewed’”.
About two weeks later, Medalia had arranged interviews with both parents, and the project was on. The resulting film, “Daughters of Abraham”, won the 2004 Angelus Award and was screened in a special presentation at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Shortly thereafter, HBO bought the film and expanded it into the documentary “To Die in Jerusalem,” - all written, directed, and produced by Medalia. In 2007, she was awarded three Emmy awards and one Peabody for her first major film. “I had kind of a quick entry into the documentary world, the real world, so to speak,” she explained, humbly. “That’s what you hope a thesis does,” Thompson adds, “to open that next door so that you can just go in that direction and follow that passion.”
Medalia did just that. During the following two decades, she moved back to Israel, started her own company, “Medalia Productions,” and produced and directed a litany of award-winning documentary films. Most are centered around the unifying themes of conflict, loss, civic action, and social injustice. Audiences around the world saw her documentary films on major television channels such as the BBC, the German Television Networks ARD and ZDF, Europe's ARTE, HBO, Paramount+, and PBS, as well as at film festivals such as Sundance, the Berlinale (Berlin, Germany), and Cannes.
Her latest film, “Children No More: Were and are Gone” – directed and produced by Medalia and co-produced by Sheila Nevins - became another significant milestone in her career, with an Oscar nomination as “Best Documentary Short Film”.
The film is an observational documentary about a vigil that began in March 2025, when a handful of concerned citizens stood silently in a public square in Tel Aviv, each holding a photograph of a child killed in Gaza. Every image shows the child’s name, their age, and the date of death. The bottom of each picture reads “was and is no more.” Week after week, new names are added, new photographs are printed and lifted high. Each week, more people step forward to join this quiet act of protest. “It’s a film about grief and humanity and about the ability to, despite the pain and the divide within society, stand by your core values, even when it's really not popular,” Medalia said. “I think what's very strong about the film is how just standing with these pictures could be seen by some people as a betrayal. I think it's about how silence can be very strong and can be a very loud scream”.
It was on Jan. 22, around 3 pm Tel Aviv time, when the 2026 Academy Award nominations were officially announced, live from Beverly Hills, and that is when Medalia and her team learned that “Children No More” had made it from the short list into the final round.
“I was hoping and maybe expecting a little bit to be on the short list, but I didn't really think we would be nominated. So that was a really big surprise! And then of course the craziness begins. Also, my feeling of, you know, what do I need to do now? How do I use this moment to meet new people and create new relationships?”She’s headed to Los Angeles next week.
The Academy Award show – the “Oscars” - will be broadcast live at 6 p.m. on March 15th on ABC/Hulu. Keep your fingers crossed for our own - SIU Alumna - Hilla Medalia!
View a trailer for "Children No More"