Every place in Israel has rules of its own, and each city – stories of its own. In URBAN LEGENDS, we want to give room for diversity and multicultural aspects through the prism of genre – thriller, science fiction, horror. It’s a series that introduces, for the first time, the dark, strange and fascinating side of those parts of Israel that aren’t usually seen on screen - while making use of each place’s unique features and conflicts.

In the tradition of genre anthologies, from “The Twilight Zone” to “Black Mirror,” each episode will offer a new twist on reality and tell a story that deals with the real Israel of the here and now. The same twist will add a new dimension to the real-life experience while also subverting the drab realism often accompanying stories of living in the periphery. Stories that show that even in quintessential periphery cities like Rahat and Bnei Brak, you can make television that breaks the mundane everyday.

For instance, in our series, a tech industry entrepreneur of Ethiopian descent who moves to live in upper-class Caesarea becomes invisible to his neighbors. A girl from the border-adjacent town of Sderot, who discovers an unexploded Qassam rocket in her backyard, will hide the rocket and make friends with it, and turn the ticking bomb into her best friend – one that would replace her friends who left town with their families.

While the episodes will be standalone, they will interconnect in various ways that will reward viewing the entire season as a whole. For instance, a mysterious news report heard in one episode will be explained a few episodes later in a story about a neighboring town. This is how the series will gradually create a new shared mythology of the Israeli periphery.

Each season will comprise ten episodes. Owing to the anthological structure, each episode will be directed by directors of different and diverse backgrounds, in a mix of both young promising talents and established filmmakers.;

The series deals with the sidelines and seeks to put them in the center. The heroes and heroines of these stories will come from different backgrounds, giving us new exciting heroes that until now were usually portrayed as secondary characters at best – whether it’s due to their ethnicity, age, or place of living.

All those characters will go through a jarring experience that will remind them how fragile their world is, how the carpet can be pulled from under their feet at any moment, and force them to reexamine their fundamental values.

This kind of experience may seem all too familiar from the last two years, in which life had become a kind of horror film. We cannot prevent the fear around us, but with this series, we want to embrace it. To show that it also has power. Because in the end, the fear of the unknown, the fear of being alone, transcend cultural differences. They connect us through our shared humanity and remind us that despite our differences, which sometimes seem exceedingly insurmountable, we are all actually quite similar.