Israelis, as befits a people who lived in constricted geographical circumstances and are eager imbibers of Western culture, are rabid movie fans. This tiny country can lay claim to 15 film schools with the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School being the most influential, and a café in Tel Aviv that boasts, for better or worse, the name of the director Quentin Tarantino. Although Israel has produced its share of affecting films since the 1960s—Sallah, Three Days and a Child (based on the story by A.B. Yehoshua), and the earlier movies of Gila Almagor and Assi Dayan—starting two decades ago it began creating a body of singular, even dazzling work. These include controversial, hard-driving documentaries—The Gatekeepers (which was nominated for an Oscar in 2013), The Law in These Parts, and Waltz with Bashir—and nuanced examinations of different aspects of Israeli life, such as Yossi & Jagger, Fill the Void, and Late Marriage. Global distributors began taking note, despite the fact that the American audience for most of these films was considered tiny. These days, some of the excitement of moviemaking has moved to television, where Israel excels in creating riveting series, ranging from In Treatment to Shtisel to Our Boys, but the recent Jerusalem Film Festival demonstrated that the medium of film continues to showcase an abundance of native talent.
One of the films that caused a stir at this summer’s JFF was a first, deceivingly quiet feature by Nimrod Eldar titled The Day After I’m Gone. The opening image of a lit-up Ferris wheel set against twinkling lights suggests a moody indie film, all private vision and no intellectual vigor, but as the movie gradually but inexorably unfolds, the opposite proves to be true. The first scene is a close-up of a jaguar being given oxygen in pre-op. A recently widowed 50-year-old veterinarian with a slight paunch named Yoram (Menashe Noy), who works at a safari park outside of Tel Aviv, comes in to perform the operation on the cat, efficiently but somewhat wearily. Yoram, who has a full head of hair and sports black glasses and a small mustache this side of perky, specializes in resonant silences; he looks resistingly at the passing world outside the window of his kitchen.
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