This year’s crop of eight new Israeli feature films that had their Israeli premieres in the Haggiag Competition were, for the most part, strong and entertaining, which bodes well for the future of the Israeli movie industry.
Like last year, the directors were mostly women, many of whom focused on strong female characters in movies that will have a universal appeal. Most of these films would play well for international audiences, if they ever get released abroad.
Two movies look at the often uneasy reality of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. The character Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird famously said that you can’t understand another person until you spend some time walking around in his shoes, and The Sea by Shai Carmeli Pollak put you in the shoes of a Palestinian father (Khalifa Natour) and his 12-year-old son (Mohamad Ghazawi).
They are from a village near Ramallah and the boy is excited about a class trip to the beach but is disappointed when he is not allowed across the checkpoint due to a problem with his permit, so he sneaks over on his own. His father, who works in Israel as an undocumented construction worker, sets out to find his son, despite the risk of being caught and losing his livelihood.
The movie features two amazing performances from the father and son, and their work and a nuanced script makes you understand how, for many Palestinians, Israel is like a foreign country. The difficulties the child has walking around in Bnei Brak and Tel Aviv and just trying to find the beach are eye opening. Every line of this movie has the subtext that there must be a better way to live together.
BELLA, BY a Jewish/Palestinian directing duo, Zohar Shachar and Jamal Khalaily, is a broad comedy and was fun from start to finish. It’s a rarity that comedies play at the film festival in this competition and I can count on one hand the Israeli comedies I’ve seen in 25 years there.
It has a predictably over-the-top comic premise: a man who bred rare doves has just died, and left no will about who will inherit his most valuable possession, a rare dove named Bella worth tens of thousands of dollars. His estranged son (Elisha Banai) returns from Belgium where he is trying to make it as a musician, and his adopted Palestinian son, who stayed with the father till the end, have to figure it out. The dove ends up at a wedding on the West Bank, and they have to find it and figure out a compromise, an obvious metaphor for the national conflict, but one that is explored with humor.
Yes, some characters are stereotypes and some of the jokes will likely offend people, but I felt it worked and it’s the first film to use humor in dealing with the conflict since Sameh Zoabi’s Tel Aviv is On Fire. One fun fact is that it was co-produced by the acclaimed Belgian director brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, probably the only film they have ever worked on with Moshe Edery.
CUZ YOU’RE UGLY by Sharon Angelhart tells the story of an overweight young female soldier (Riki Reif Sinai) who comes home from the army to visit her troubled family before going to an officer’s course. It is an achievement that a young woman from such a family – her father (Yossi Marshek) is affable but absent and her mother (Yael Abecassis) is depressed and bedridden – could make it to this stage in the army.
At first, I thought this story about a teen whose family falls through the cracks in the social-services system would be overly bleak, but it won me over. The heroine is such a lovable underdog, and she is the only one fighting to help her sister (Or Avinoam) when she gets pregnant at 15 (Avinoam starred in Of Dogs and Men by Dani Rosenberg about a teenager returning to Nir Oz after October 7). It’s a moving story, with some laughs along the way.
IT SEEMS odd when two movies with similar plots and themes are released in a single year, but that was the case this year with Or Sinai’s Mama and Eti Tsicko’s Nandauri, both focusing on women from Eastern Europe living in Israel who return home, only to be reminded of why they left in the first place, and both featuring strong lead performances.
Evgenia Dodina is a great actress who always gives wonderful performances, no matter what the part, and she shines in every moment of Mama, which had its international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. She plays Mila, a Polish woman from a poor village who has spent years in Israel as a housekeeper to a wealthy family, so she can send money home to her husband and daughter and build a dream house for them all.
The Israeli family depends on her, and when she breaks her wrist cleaning, they send her home for a rare vacation. Back in Poland, she finds things have changed. Her husband has taken a younger lover (as she has, in Israel), and her daughter has dropped out of university and gotten engaged. Used to being in control, she struggles to transform her family’s life as she would want it to be, and it’s a heartbreaking story.
Nandauri is set in rural Georgia, and Marina (Neta Riskin of Shtisel), an Israeli lawyer, shows up in a small town in the mountains. She grew up in a brutal family near the town and left years before, so her mission on behalf of a client who grew up in this town is personal to her. It takes a while to get going, but eventually a complicated road trip spotlights Marina’s relationship with a local man who is connected to the case, to whom she voices her anger over her abusive parents.
Movies with buzz around them
THERE WAS a lot of buzz around Dead Language, by Michal Brezis and Oded Binnun, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival. It’s an expanded version of their extremely charming Oscar-nominated short Aya, about a woman (Sarah Adler) who impulsively picks up a stranger (Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen) at the airport, pretending to be his chauffeur.
Dead Language still starts with that setup and those two wonderful actors, but it becomes a sprawling look at the discontents of a long marriage of a Jerusalem couple. Yehezkel Lazarov plays her self-absorbed academic husband, and German actor Lars Eidinger is another foreign stranger with whom she has a fleeting encounter. While Aya was very realistic, Dead Language moves into a realm that eventually becomes fantastic, as it gets deeper into Aya’s trouble head.
Houses, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, was directed by Veronica Nicole Tettelbaum, and is an austere, carefully made, beautifully photographed black-and-white portrait of a non-binary man who immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in 1990 and who returns as a young adult to all the houses he lived in during his childhood in Safed, reliving traumas and examining his memories. If this were any other year, a film with this subject matter would be playing at every international film festival in the world.
Oxygen, by Netalie Braun, tells the story of Anat (Dana Ivgy), a single mother who plans a trip to India with her soldier son (Ben Sultan) once he is discharged, but her plans are disrupted when a war breaks out on the northern border.
The heart of the story is the mother’s fear that her only son will be killed and no emotion could be more touching, but there is something muddled about the conception of the film. Sometimes it seems to be a critique of Israeli militarism, and the plot gradually becomes more far-fetched. Part of the problem is that Ivgy, one of Israel’s most distinguished actresses, looks far too young to play this part. While she is in her early 40s and technically is old enough to be his mother, she looks about 35, and it’s a jarring casting decision.
You can look for all of these movies to be released over the coming year in theaters throughout Israel.