Price : NIS15
The Israel Film Fund Collection

The Fifth Heaven

103 Minutes, 2011
Genre:
Feature

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Directed by: Dina Zvi Riklis
Cast: Amit Moshkovitz, Yehezkel Lazarov, Rotem Zisman-Cohen, Roi Miller, Gay Adler, Aki Avni, Esti Zakheim
Photographer: Shay Goldman
Languages: Hebrew, English
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Subtitles: Hebrew

Director Dina Zvi-Riklis’s film is a big screen adaptation of Rachel Eytan’s 1962 bestseller of the same title that won her the Brenner Prize. In 1944, the latter days of British Mandatory rule of Palestine, 13-year-old Maya arrives at an orphanage/shelter. And whilst not an orphan per se, her mother did abandon her for a new life in the US whilst her father, who has since remarried, can no longer raise her. Dr. Markowski, an old friend of Maya’s father’s who runs the place, welcomes her to the shelter. Unbeknownst to Maya, Markowski had had an affair with her mother years ago and is now starting to wonder whether he might be her real father.
As Maya tries to adjust to life in the shelter, we become acquainted with the other shelter lodgers and staff’s backstories: the abandoned girls, the resistance member, the kibbutz-born volunteer, the cook who claims she used to be Warsaw’s nightlife queen, the cleaner who ran away from a religious home to start a relationship with a British officer, and so on.
The orphanage/shelter serves as an anchor and haven in the midst of the then-tumultuous reality towards the end of World War II, and on the cusp of the end of British Mandatory rule and the establishing of the State of Israel.

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