Price : NIS15

Aunt Clara

96 Minutes, 1977
Genre:
Feature

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Directed by: Avraham Heffner
Cast: Hanna Meron, Edna Fliedel, Ruth Segal, Yael Pearl (Becker), Shmuel Bunim, Yosef Carmon, Shmuel Rodensky, Meir Fenigstein, Gita Luka, Hinna Rozovska, Bronka Salzman
Production:Ruedi Cohn
Production Company:April Films Ltd.
Photographer: David Gurfinkel
Language: Hebrew
| Subtitles not available

Director Avraham Heffner’s sophomore film is a tragicomic melodrama following the lives of a Jewish-Polish family in late 1970s Tel Aviv. The film opens on a shot of Ben Yehuda High Street with a superimposed caption that reads: ‘this is a film about Auntie Clara, who is the eldest sister and matriarch of our family. About Auntie Clara and her sister, the handsome Roja, and Leah – the sidelined sister. And their three husbands: Shmuel, and Michel who always thinks he’s coming down with something, and Yaakov – who really has come down with everything. And Meir – Clara, and Roja, and Leah’s brother, who lives in London; and little Ziva’le who’s got every last one of us here as parents; and Dudik, her fella. They all live with us here, together, in Tel Aviv, Israel.’

The film is a love letter and indictment in equal measure of Heffner’s parents’ generation – the Yiddish-speaking Poles who helped build the Jewish state. It explores this version of a family unit where the women call the shots and the men dutifully follow: the characters must face their many petty dramas, unsettled scores and grudges of yore, health problems, and the ever-present generational gap.

Aunt Clara is the uncontested Alpha of this middle-class family. As a rule, what she says – goes: as such, she expertly (micro)manages her sisters with whom she runs a bridalwear sewing shop, not to mention their husbands and Ziva’le, Roja’s daughter, who’s got her heart set on marrying Dudik. Clara decides to send Ziva’le off to London where she would be living with her uncle Meir; thereby breaking her and Dudik up whom she and her sisters don’t consider to be husband material. When Ziva’le returns from the UK, she and Dudik are reunited and decide to tie the knot after all.

Just as he had done in his previous film, But Where is Daniel Wax?, where the titular character is mentioned and built up all throughout but is not seen right up to the every end, only to emerge as a risible, contemptible figure, here too Meir – the three sisters’ brother who is living the good life in swinging London is talked about all throughout the film, but when he finally does turn up in the end – he is the furthest thing from the way he had been described.

The film was shot by David Gurfinkel, with the upbeat yet melancholy theme tune by Sasha Argov.

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