A highly personal story of the director’s relationship with his father, their shared love of cinema, and his father’s illness. Rosenberg’s feature debut mixes fact, fiction, and autobiography as the film grapples with the big questions of life and death. Marek Rozenbaum as the father gives the beautiful performance of a man whose body is slowing down while he furiously struggles against mortality.
While the father is unsentimental in his approach toward his last days, his son disconnects from reality in a desperate attempt to see his father as a hero. Although in the fictional story, Tel Aviv goes up in flames the father’s real world does not end with a bang but a slow vanishing whimper.
With this documentary-feature hybrid film, Rosenberg sets a high bar for his future work.
