At thirty-seven, Miri is a twice-widowed, El Al flight attendant. Her well-regulated existence is suddenly turned upside down by an abandoned Chinese boy whose migrant-worker mother has been summarily deported from Israel. The film is a touching comic-drama in which two human beings — as different from each other as Tel Aviv is from Beijing — accompany each other on a remarkable journey, one that takes them both back to a meaningful life.Read More »
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Joy can’t let go of her ex, but doesn’t seem to be able to fall for the new guy. In the meantime she keeps having casual sex with strangers.Read More »
Danny is pregnant by Max but she doesn’t get around to telling him at a party. Meanwhile, Max is busy trying out his girlfriend Avishag’s sexual fantasies with her. She wants him to hit her when they have sex. Avishag takes her bruises over to Dror, whose dog she sits. A familiarity develops between the older man and the young woman that neither of them expected.Read More »
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Yoav’s demons start haunting him after his best friend becomes pregnant without telling him, and after his boyfriend of 15 years starts talking about children too. His life unravels, and self-destruction seems inevitable.Read More »
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A troubled family must face the facts when something goes terribly wrong at their son’s desolate military post.Read More »
A German Jewish engineer is the only survivor of a concentration camp where he would work in a counterfeiting unit.Read More »
The world of Hanna Mendelssohn, an 80 year old widow, disintegrates as the Kibbutz which she helped to found undergoes privatization.Read More »
In the 1990s David Perlov returned to the format of the filmed diaries he produced between 1973 and 1983, organized in a different way, closer to the cinematographic essay, and divided into three thematic chapters, “Sheltered Childhood”, “Routine and Rituals” and “Back to Brazil”. In the first, we follow the childhood of his grandchildren; in the second, the political routine of Israel, the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu and various rituals that make up the country’s daily life; in the third, Perlov returns to Brazil, remaking, for the last time, his trips to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte.Read More »
A marked advance on Sontag’s first two films (Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl) in terms of imagination and cogency, this personal essay about contemporary Israel reflects much of the same passion and intelligence to be found in her non-fictional prose. Addressing itself to tragic and contradictory elements in the state of Israel itself rather than a broader consideration of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it intermittently suggests the influence of Russian documentary film-maker Dziga Vertov in its use of sound and grasp of visual syntax. But while many of Vertov’s works are songs of celebration, Promised Lands – through statements by a novelist, physicist, psychiatrist, and a harrowing final sequence of a soldier being ‘treated’ for shock – is closer to the feeling of a scream. Like some of Sontag’s other work, it may suffer from an attraction to morbidity that detracts from a wholly lucid exposition. – Time OutRead More »