Price : NIS15
The Israel Film Fund Collection

Again, Forever

93 Minutes, 1985
Genre:
Feature

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Directed by: Oded Kotler
Production:Nurit Shani
Photographer: Hanania Baer
Original Music: Shem Tov Levi
Language: Hebrew
| Subtitles not available

Actor-director Oded Kotler’s film, based on a story by Yitzhak Ben-Ner (who also wrote the screenplay), is a critical allegory for the moral depravity of Israel’s 1948 founding generation – the same Labour comrades who built the State of Israel only to become, in the end, completely and utterly morally bankrupt.
The plot of the film is set in 1977 Israel, on the eve of the seismic political earthquake that saw Israel’s long-governing socialist Labour party ousted from office by Likud, after nearly 30 years in power. At the centre of the story is Effie (Topol), a high-powered barrister who has just turned 50. At the start of the film, Effie thinks he is having a heart attack, but his doctor then explains that the pain he’s been experiencing is the result of mental stress. The country is changing all around ‘comrade’ Effie – whose comfortably cushy life, with strong ties to the ruling party is slowly crumbling away, along with the party’s old moral backbone. Effie, who’s been handling the legal affairs of his MP friends, gradually realises how corrupt they’ve all become. Now neck deep in politics at its nastiest, Effie still believes he can somehow emerge from this unscathed and with hands clean.
Effie, now on his second marriage, also happens to have a voracious sexual appetite. A serial bed-hopper, he now finds himself calling upon his ex-wife Ariela (Galia Topol) increasingly often, as she reminds him of a happier, simpler time – and perhaps also a happier, simpler Israel which he so longs for. Effie and Ariela visit the kibbutz where they both trained as lawyers, but their rekindled romance ends up as no more than a fleeting episode. After all, they’ve both now started over with new families. Effie, like his party, fails to change his spots and the inevitable result is indeed a crushing fall from grace.

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