Aviya’s Summer is one of Israeli cinema’s greatest, most-beloved success stories of the 1980s. Gila Almagor, who stars in the film, also co-produced it with Eitan Evan and co-wrote the script with Haim Bouzaglo, based on her autobiographical book of the same title in which she recounts her childhood experiences.
Ten-year-old fatherless Aviya is taken out of boarding school by her Holocaust survivor mother, who was recently discharged from a psychiatric ward. Together, they live in an agricultural village in early 1950s Israel. The film is made up of various episodes following Aviya’s attempts at fitting into society, and scenes portraying the incredibly strained, difficult relationship between herself and her mentally ill mother, including the famous scene where the mother shaves Aviya’s head when she suspects she has lice – an act that turns the shorn young girl into the object of scorn and ridicule of all the other village kids – and one of the film’s most poignant scenes when it is Aviya’s birthday and the party is universally snubbed by everyone. In fact, the scene had traumatised Israeli children of the eighties so much so that the term ‘Aviya bufday [sic]’ was coined, referring to a failed get-together that no one’s bothered to attend.
Aviya’s Summer took home the Golen Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival, in addition to featuring at multiple other festivals around the world, winning scores of awards. In 1994, the sequel Under the Domim Tree was released.
Here is a new and restored digital copy of the film (restoration), produced by the Israel Film Archive at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. The restoration work, supervised by cinematographer David Gurfinkel, was created in collaboration with and with the support of The Israel Film Fund, the Israeli Film Council, the Ministry of Culture and Sports, Mifal HaPais and United King Films. The project aims to preserve and make available to the public selected works from the Israeli film repertoire of the highest quality.
