Not Just Composite Sketches and Illustrations: A New Film Peers Into Gil Gibli’s Mind

"I put the person into the situation. Really, I want them to place themselves inside it. I want to know that they remember. I think about where the suspect stood, how the shadow fell on the eyes, the depth it created in the eye sockets... ואז I draw something two-dimensional and he sees something three-dimensional. I strive to get to the schema, the general structure, and then I move on to characterizing the face. I put into these people the idea of abstract thinking, which a small child understands and an old person understands; someone from Equatorial Guinea understands and someone from Manhattan will understand too," explains Gil Gibli, the Globes composite sketch artist and illustrator.

At the heart of the documentary film "Facial Features," which is competing in the Israeli competition at the Docaviv 2026 festival and will have its premiere screening next week, are Gibli and his singular working method. This is not the first time Gibli has played a significant role in a documentary film. Nor is it the first time he has teamed up with the same director, David Ofek.

The first time was in 2003, in the film "The 17th Victim," which won the Ophir Award and screened in the Israeli competition at the Docaviv festival. The film opens with the June 2002 suicide bombing on bus 830 at the Megiddo Junction. One victim, the 17th victim, was not identified. No one came to identify the body. Ofek set out to crack the mystery with almost no lead at all. Through the police, he reached their composite sketch artist, Gibli. Gibli questioned the bus driver and a girl of about 16 who had worked for two days as a customer surveyor at the company. Based on the two testimonies, collected no less than four months after that random bus ride, Gibli arrived at an astonishingly accurate portrait, and eventually at a name. Eliahu, or Eliko, Timsit was the 17th victim.

"To get to this victim, to something like that? That is only the Holy One, blessed be He. He helped me. It is like a billiard ball, I strike the white one and it hits 15 balls, and they all bounce off the cushions and go into the pockets, without exception. This film moves me to this day," says Gibli, who is credited with helping catch many criminals thanks to the composite sketches he drew.

"She was born from me now"

The police turn to him less often now. But Gibli is called again and again to draw people who are no longer alive, who have passed from the world without leaving a trace, except in the memory of the people who loved them. Those relatives ask for a face they can pass on. When he is summoned for these drawings, Ofek arrives, camera in hand. For almost 25 years now. The result of this partnership is the new film, "Facial Features."

"Every time I called him to document. It was almost always around the Holocaust," Gibli says. The film reveals the magic and complexity of his work process. In one scene, he works with a Holocaust survivor from Kibbutz Shamir who asks to reconstruct his sister’s face, a sister who perished. Step by step, Gibli literally draws the memory out of his consciousness. He is meticulous about every detail: what was she wearing? Which side was the butcher shop on? Where was the room? How did she react to the gift you brought? And before our eyes, a face takes shape.

"She was born from me now, thanks to this midwife," says the emotional old man, gesturing toward the artist. From hair in the nostrils to the curve of the eyebrow, everything matters in creating a faithful image. "In the police it is called 'memory refresh,'" Gibli explains. "There is a person responsible for drawing out the details of the incident from the complainant, 'Was there an accident? Did he signal? From which side did the car emerge?' and then the artist comes in. It is a police function I do not know if still exists, but in my case, I filled it. There was no 'memory refresher.' Just me."

The legendary figure that finally got a face

Pavel Frenkel, commander of the EZI, the Jewish Military Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto, who was killed in battle against the Nazis, remained an obscure figure for seven decades, no photo of him was found, and no biographical record was located either. Moshe Arens, a Betar and Revisionist Movement man, defense minister for Likud in the Shamir government, felt offended that the contribution of Betar trainees and Revisionist figures in the Warsaw Ghetto had not entered the pages of history as fearless fighters, while Mordechai Anielewicz and the youths of the socialist movements who formed the ZOB, the Jewish Fighting Organization, took all the glory.

With no photograph, Arens sought to create a portrait of Frenkel for his book "Flags Over the Ghetto." He managed to locate three witnesses who claimed to have known Frenkel: Shoshana "Emilka" Kosover, later Rosenzweig, Pnina Tzebchik, later Finkelstein, who knew Frenkel in the ghetto through their work as organization couriers, and Israel Rivak, who claimed that Frenkel had been his instructor at a Betar branch in Warsaw before the war, though Rivak himself had left Europe before the war broke out.

"As a police composite sketch artist expert in the Israel Police, Arens recruited me for the task. We met each of those witnesses, at their homes or at his, and I drew sketches based on their descriptions, from which I intended to draw the final unified version. Ahead of the meeting with Israel Rivak, one of those acquaintances, I printed the portrait of Frenkel that I had created on the basis of Emilka Kosover’s testimony, on a book cover, in order to surprise him with a book about Frenkel that had supposedly already been published. The attempt failed. He did not recognize the figure. I began building a new composite sketch with him, and in retrospect, that is where a saga of mistakes began.

The composite sketch was changed to Rivak’s satisfaction and therefore also to Arens’s, who hoped that the combination of the three testimonies would produce the result closest to the original. The composite sketch drawn according to Shoshana Emilka Kosover Rosenzweig’s testimony, alongside Frenkel’s picture from the Polish army archive, the portrait that was published in Arens’s book was received with great respect in the global Betar movement. Trainees of the movement, and even government ministers from Likud, carried my drawing at a memorial rally for the heroes of the ghetto.

In 2013, the Postal Service issued a stamp to mark the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with a drawing of Frenkel, based on my composite sketch. In 2020, the Yad Vashem Museum placed the drawing in its permanent exhibition, in a room dedicated to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Following that, streets were named after him across the country, and one of them is, surprisingly, the street where the Globes newsroom is located. Whoever made that decision in the Rishon Lezion municipality certainly did not connect the dots or know that the portrait of Pavel Frenkel was drawn with exact precision on the very same street that would later be named after him.

Shortly after Arens’s book was published in 2009, all three witnesses I interviewed died. The portrait had already been "naturalized" in the world and become his official likeness, like the portrait of Maimonides that once appeared on a banknote and legend says was actually a drawing of a Turkish merchant. Then, in 2023, I received a phone call from a man at the Begin Center, who told me about a forgotten article found in the Jabotinsky Archive, written by Jeremiah Halpern, who founded Betar’s naval branch and was in charge of the naval officers’ school in Civitavecchia, Italy. In his article he writes that Pavel Frenkel, commander of the EZI, was his trainee in the Betar naval officers’ course, and even sailed with him from Italy to Israel and back on the first, and last, voyage of the ship "Sarah A'" between 1937 and 1938.

The composite sketch drawn according to the testimony of Pnina Tzebchik Finkelstein and Frenkel’s photograph from the ceremony at Trumpeldor Cemetery, in her testimony he gives many details about Frenkel, and notes that Frenkel was an outstanding officer in the Polish army. This was enough for the researchers at the Begin Center, Dror Bar-Yosef and Yossi Suvid, to locate his file in the Polish military archive, including his photograph. The biographical details matched everything Halpern had said about him, and that only strengthened his testimony. Of course, the first thing the researchers did was present me with the photograph, but to me it was a generic photo, not convincing enough.

Fortunately, the researchers found photographs from that voyage to the Land of Israel in the Jabotinsky Archive, and then a video report from the Carmel Newsreels was discovered in the cinematheque archive, in which the course trainees can be seen at a ceremony of honor at Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv, at the graves of the victims of the riots. I focused on those photographs and on close-ups from the footage, especially when the camera passes over the cadets in formation. One figure, in a white uniform, was identified as Frenkel, but he bore no resemblance at all to the portrait of Frenkel I had drawn 15 years earlier. Naturally, I was disappointed, but when I tried to trace the stages in the development of the composite sketch, I returned to the drafts I had created during my work, and discovered the drawings I had made based on Emilka’s and Pnina’s testimonies, before the changes following Rivak’s testimony. And indeed, those drafts matched, in my view, all the parameters in my identification method.

The final version of the composite sketch, after it was corrected according to Israel Rivak’s descriptions, the researchers at the Begin Center pointed out to me that a Polish officer named Janusz Cezary Kattling, from the Polish underground that cooperated with the EZI, testified after the war that Frenkel told him about training that EZI members had undergone in Israel. Until this discovery, it was customary to "correct" Kattling and explain that he meant emissaries from the Land of Israel who trained Betar members on Polish soil, but here a new possibility opened up, maybe Pavel Frenkel really did arrive in the Land of Israel as part of military training before the war?

Frenkel’s identity remained obscure to me. On the one hand, it is most likely the cadet in the photograph. On the other hand, until the resurrection of the dead comes and Frenkel himself testifies that he is the man, we will probably have to remain with the original version I drew for Arens, or at least alongside the newly found photographs.

"I purify the world"

He works in a darkened cubicle at the edge of a large space filled with journalists, behind a dark blue curtain, "Yael’s house" in open-space conditions. Rushing there accompanied by bicycles, a Jewish cap, side curls, a checkered shirt. A figure that is easy to draw. Since 1989, Gibli has been Globes’ chief illustrator, creating portraits in the same slanted cross-hatching lines that he perfected as an assistant in New York to Raanan Lurie, considered one of the world’s leading cartoonists.

Gibli says that dozens of women who had been attacked and raped came to that cubicle to give testimony, in order to create the composite sketch of the criminal. He remembers that religious girls who had been raped were brought to him. They refused to speak. "When their psychologist went out to the bathroom, I urged them to talk. They spoke Yiddish. It was a terrible case. He kept raping for another year and a half, I had to get information that would lead to his capture already. Now he is serving a life sentence."

Does hearing about all the crimes dirty you, leave a mark on your soul? "The opposite, I purify the world," he laughs. "This profession is amazing. It has stories from here to eternity."

Gibli got into composite sketches thanks to Sandi Bar. In 1997, a publicity office contacted him and asked him to draw a composite sketch of Bar for a Milky commercial, for a WANTED ad in Wild West style. "The result was not liked by the Council of Advertising Elders," Gibli laughs. "They said it did not look like a composite sketch." The advertising office sent him to the police, to teach me how to draw composite sketches.

The composite sketch of Sandi Bar. A trigger for a career, photo: Gil Gibli

At the police, they taught him their method, but he said he could do their job better. "I learned to say that sentence when I studied in New York. To the person who takes you to work, say, 'I know.' Because until they know that I do not know, I will already have 400 dollars left in my pocket."

When I tell him that this was a tactic used by Holocaust survivors, to say they knew how to carpent, sew or repair in order to survive, he nods. "I can’t say I was starving there, but I hardly had a shekel in my pocket."

A unique working method

Since 2004, Gibli has held a registered patent for drawing composite sketches. "This method is based on dividing the face into several parts in a way that looks like letters, U, T, A, V, and that is my pride. People who deal with forensic psychology came to me and wanted to examine it. I was invited to South Africa and Scotland and they saw that it works. Their method is called ABO-PEET, from the word evolution, it offers algorithms of 18 figures and from them you move on. But there the eyewitness takes over the brain, I wanted to chart a path. To avoid mistakes. To advance, even if slowly. In the other method, you can take a right turn and get lost. They present the person with a matrix of several figures, differing from one another only slightly. How can he pinpoint which one is correct?"

The face divided according to the patent registered in Gibli’s name

In the film, there is an exact illustration of this way of working. Gibli is asked to draw a deceased person with no photograph, and they offer him a chance to meet a nephew who looks very much like him. He refuses flatly.

Gibli’s biography unfolds in the film. His father, Yitzhak Gibli, a legendary fighter in Unit 101, was captured by the Jordanians, and the operations to secure his release were known as the Gil operations, an acronym for Gibli Yitzhak Lechofesh, and also gave his son his name; his parents’ divorce when he was a child and living with his grandparents; his adoption by a couple from Kibbutz Mizra, friends of his father; and the agreement to marry his wife without even seeing her face, דווקא with a man who tracks facial features. And his being a jazz journalist and baal teshuva, living in New York and volunteering in the cowshed after October 7. So many, many colors.

Even after a whole film about you, your background and your work, viewers still do not know who Gil Gibli is. He laughs. "Me neither."

"Facial Features" will screen at the Docaviv festival, which opened this week, and will air on yes Docu.