Alon Aboutboul

A high-school girl dreams of being a writer and writes a story about her soldier boyfriend.Read More »

This is a little like an extended but half-serious variation on the “Uptown Girl” song video where the working-class guy meets the beautiful model from the billboard. But a few more people are involved. Here, the guy is married and his daughter has a crush on the weatherman. The weatherman wants to marry the cosmetics queen from the billboards. The cosmetics queen kind of likes the guy’s sidekick. The sidekick kind of likes the guy’s daughter, although she’s in high school and the age difference would raise anyone’s eyebrows. The movie is a nice character study about accepting or denying who we really are and what we really want. It’s missing an anchor character in the middle with whom the audience could identify, but the eccentrics are obviously what interested the filmmakers. Real-life cosmetics queen Pnina Rosenblum was a good enough sport to allow her own home to be used as the home of the fictional character based on herself.Read More »

On the day of his father’s funeral, the curious and meddlesome adolescent Nadav (Aviv Elkabeth) peeps in through the window of the funeral home where the rabbi is making last minute preparations for the burial, a task that involves calling an unreliable, impatient repairman during a torrential rain in order to fix a chronically squeaky gurney wheel. Ordering the technician to remain throughout the services in an attempt to ensure the soundness of his repair work, the somber proceeds from the idiosyncratic point of view of the erratic wheel as it precariously wobbles out of stability and back into its familiar, irritating din. The seemingly surreal, deceptively lyrical opening sequence provides an elegantly conceived framework for filmmaker Savi Gabizon’s elegantly modulated tragicomedy.Read More »