From the movie "My Beloved Daughter"/United King
In one of the climax moments of "The tears flow by themselves", one of Ethan Green's most beautiful films, one of the characters asks the hero - "Who taught you to kiss like that?".
I would like to ask Eitan a similar question - "Who taught you to write and direct like that?"
Ethan Green directs as his hero kisses.
with stormy passion but also blessedly;
with absolute skill - as if he had been preparing for this all his life;
And always first and foremost thinking about the pleasure of the other side - the audience.
Green learned to write and direct in the film department at Tel Aviv University.
He is a graduate of his first and legendary cohort, in the late seventies.
A glimpse of his human and cinematic worldview can be found in an interview conducted with him at the time by two other graduates of the circle, who came to him about two decades after him - Aharon Kaschels and Pablo Otin.
Green told them that he formulated his principles quite early - "The character at the center of the film; the basic height of the camera is eye level; the camera moves along with the movement of an actor or because of the justification of a point of view; simple dialogue."
It sounds simple, but one can only imagine how complicated it was to maintain these principles for about fifty years of creation, in an industry that over the years only sought to complicate things more and more, put the character on the margins and raise the camera above her and above us.
Green did the opposite.
After graduating there, Green became a symbol of the film department in another way as well - as one of the favorite teachers at the institution.
There is a bitter cliché that those who do not know how to teach, but Green refuted it.
He won the outstanding lecturer award from Tel Aviv University, but also continued to successfully create films throughout different decades, from the seventies to the present day.
All this made him one of the most prolific directors in the history of contemporary Israeli cinema, and today one of the oldest.
Now comes his new movie, "My Beloved Daughter", which will be released this weekend.
Sashon Gabai plays an Israeli man who travels to Paris to visit his daughter, and discovers that she is in the midst of a fateful crisis.
On the occasion of the film's release, Cinematek Tel Aviv salutes the veteran filmmaker with a special tribute, with screenings of all the films he made in his long career.
With directors with such mileage, one can recognize a regular pattern: their first film is personal, close to home.
Then, when they have the opportunity to spread their wings, they travel far away, and only at a later stage of their careers return to their autobiography.
Green deviated from this course.
Precisely in his new film, "My Beloved Daughter", he embarked on an unprecedented adventure in his body of work, setting the script in the City of Lights and writing dialogues that combine Hebrew and French.
Other directors before him used Paris to give the script a romantic touch.
Others used its status as the capital of cinema to create a love song for the big screen.
These kinds of pretensions have never interested Green, and certainly won't start to interest him at the age of 72. The dialogue with him remains simple - in Hebrew or French, and probably even if he starts directing in Italian.
A key moment of "My Beloved Daughter" takes place against the background of the sink, and the characters chatter in the language of Moliere and Truffaut about plumbing problems.
This does not prevent the script from being sweet and dramatic.
On the contrary, he is exactly all these, like life itself.
Life, and not cinema, is what interests Green, since forever.
This is especially evident in his only film that took place behind the scenes of the film world - "Henry's Dream".
The result is different from similar works on the subject, namely "Eight and a Half" and all its imitations.
For Green, even a film that ostensibly focuses on the act of cinematic creation is actually about people and family.
Contrary to what might be expected, there is not a flood of references to those who know Han. In fact, there are none at all.
Eitan Green studied cinema, taught cinema, wrote and directed cinema, wrote about cinema and also edited other people's articles and scripts. It was required that such a creator breathe and exhale films Not so. His world of images is not a quote from one or another classic and a tribute to some niche film. His world consists of "simple" situations, which you don't need to be a film student or teacher to recognize: nightlife in "Until the End of the Night", driving lessons in The tears flow by themselves", construction contracting in "The House Rooms", plumbers in "My Beloved House".
More in Walla!
The Chambers of the Heart: "The Chambers of the House" proves once again that Eitan Green is the director with the widest heart around
To the full article
Now in the cinema: Ethan Green's new film.
From "My Beloved Daughter"/Daniel Miller
Green's lack of pretensions did not prevent his films from dealing in a groundbreaking way with charged topics, which Israeli cinema usually stays away from, or simply does not get along with.
"Lena" (1982), his first feature-length film, was one of the first films made in Israel to focus on immigrants from the Soviet Union.
"American Citizen" (1992) took place against the background of the peripheral sports world, in this case a basketball team from Ashdod playing in a low league, years before the word "periphery" became political capital.
"The tears flow from themselves" (1996) presented a new model of an Israeli man: a sensitive man who cries, and is unable to get a driver's license.
It was and still is one of the most original cultural discussions of Israeli masculinity.
"Henry's Dream" (2003) is probably one of the only films about the backstage of the cinema that does not center a director, producer or actor - but a storekeeper.
In a cinematic world that often focuses on the middle class and above, "The Rooms of the House" (2016) dealt with the economic troubles of the lower-middle class, and reflected the economic collapse of an entire Israeli generation.
And what is the loving relationship at the center of "My Beloved Daughter"?
The relationship between father and daughter, a subject that international cinema in general and local cinema in particular has hardly touched.
In addition to being a director, screenwriter and film lecturer, Green Geva is also, perhaps first and foremost, a basketball player.
He played basketball, interpreted basketball in the mythological program "Half a Step" and was a regular guest at Osishkin, the legendary hall of his beloved team Hapoel Tel Aviv.
Perhaps because of our shared fondness for the orange ball (and the losing team), "American Citizen" from the early nineties was and remains in my opinion Green's best movie, and of course also the best basketball movie in Israel.
Red is rising.
Ethan Green/Daniel Sharif
It is difficult to match the emotional power of the film.
It's a story about two broken dreams, one bigger than the other: an American basketball player who dreamed of becoming an NBA star and ended up running around on the floor in Ashdod, and a local journalist whose walls are full of posters of the stars of the American League, and who knows that he will never get to see one of them in reality, and will be content with reading on them.
In the final scene, the guest from America returns to his homeland after completely failing in Israeli basketball as well, leaving the journalist alone, who now can't even hold on to the edge of the dream.
All that remains is to send a glance at his wall - because that's how it is in life;
This is what remains of dreams - posters, and films.
More on the same topic:
Ethan Green