The Death of Cinema and My Father Too

This is a beautiful movie. The kind that makes you think about it long after it ended. The movie mixes fiction with reality to deal with the delicacy of life, relationships, life and death, in a very sincere and exposed way. I highly recommend it.

From the first minutes, it may take some effort to sort out what's the movie, what's a movie within the movie, and what's a movie within a movie within the movie. Or to leave that question aside. Or even to keep from blaming the director for posing such a riddle before giving us a reason to expect any gratification from solving it.

But it turns out that underlying the mixed-up levels of moviemaking, and an equally mixed-up timeline, there's a strong message and the director (meeting with an audience after a screening) explained a little about it. Knowing his father wouldn't live much longer, he'd wanted to cast the old man, and others in his family, in a script with a possible war in the future as a premise. He'd scarcely started before his father died, and then in a mocking turn of fate he won a grant to make the movie. At first he tried replacing his father with a noted actor (Dov Glickman) but the substitution looked absurd to him and he realized he'd need to rewrite the script from scratch.

What emerges is a fictional story about the making of that movie (with the father not expiring so prematurely). It includes some embedded footage from unrelated short films featuring the actual father, which I understand are a heartfelt tribute but which I found disruptively extraneous. The impression that most strongly emerges is that the harder the fictionalized filmmaker tries to make progress on his family-based movie, which is his way of expressing his love and loyalty, the more resistance the family gives him in return. We see similar rebuffs in the marital context, even aside from the filmmaking issue. The mixed-up nature of the overall movie could be seen as expressing the shattering of the moviemaker's hopes of successfully showing love by bringing the gift of cinematic immortality to his family.

Ultimately, the movie works. The actors help a lot, being very believable and in at least two cases -- Roni Kuban and Noa Koller-- already being very well liked by Israeli audiences.

Well written combining great humor with drama. The emotional involvement of the director makes this movie a state of the art, which feels like its existence opens a new emotional realm for him and his family.

'The Death of Cinema and My Father Too' is an unusual title for an unusual film about an unusual film. Director and script author (co-writer) Dani Rosenberg, making his feature film debut, brings to screen an emotional personal story. The premiere took place in 2020 during the pandemic edition of the Cannes Film Festival. It was then screened at a number of other festivals (some of them virtual or hybrid) during that odd year and won a few awards too. Two years of hiatus followed, and only now, in 2023, the movie meets its non-festival audiences. To the question of whether this postponement helped or harmed, we will get the answer after the commercial screenings in the theaters. My opinion is that it doesn't really matter. First of all, the film deals with timeless issues - dealing with the illness of someone very close and the prospect of approaching death, difficult separations from parents, gaps between generations, cinema as a means of therapy and of confronting life's problems. It does it with original and courageous means, but some are not always comfortable for the viewers. In the background we can see events related to the political reality of Israel and the Middle East. The scenes are shot around late 2018 and early 2019, but the political conflicts are the same and the people haven't changed much. The same problems, the same pains, the same nostalgia.

"The Death of Cinema and My Father Too" combines the film-in-film structure with cinéma vérité and voiceover additions. The main character is Dani, who copes with his father's terminal illness by enlisting him as the lead actor in a fictional film made with the whole family. In the fictional film Tel Aviv is about to be attacked by missiles launched from Iran and the family takes refuge in Jerusalem. It would be a kind of sarcastic comment on the state of permanent tension in which this country finds itself, true five years ago and just as true now. A few days after filming began, the father's medical condition worsened and he was unable to continue filming. The son decides to replace him with an actor and to continue making the film. When the unavoidable happens, what be left behind is a film, or perhaps a film about this film. It will be carried out against the wishes of his father, who refuses any form of immortalization, including a traditional burial with a grave and a monument in a cemetery.

From a cinematic point of view, this is a very interesting experiment. Those related in the film happened as they are told in the script. In the end Dani Rosenberg made a film about the making of the film in which a film is being made. In the lead roles he cast two actors that I would call semi-professionals. His role, that of Dani, was given to his friend, TV journalist and anchor Roni Kuban who is formidable. Equally good is Marek Rozenbaum, who is mostly a film producer and only an occasional actor, as the father. Part of the family members (including the director's mother) are also part in the cast to play their own roles. This mix works in many moments and bogs down in a few others. Interspersed are also sequences from the director's childhood and teenage family films. It is undoubtedly an interesting artistic approach, and the main theme of the film I think is this - confronting illness and impending death with the help of the art of film. Savvy viewers will, of course, be interested and engaged in what is happening on the screen. What about the rest of the public, who are not necessarily interested in cinematic experiments? Those who, as the father says in a line from the film, come to the cinema to see a life story and some 'real' actors? I think they will have some problems and will less easily accept scenes like the one where the camera is forgotten somewhere, pointed at a ceiling or a window and only the dialogue is recorded. I don't think that the artistic finishing is lacking, but it is purposely set aside to emphasize the experiment. Under these conditions, I am afraid that not all viewers will take the step that leads to the assimilation of the message and emotional involvement. With 'The Death of Cinema and My Father Too', Dani Rosenberg proved that he can make interesting cinema. We are to see in the future if he manages to keep the inventiveness while broadening the thematic of his future movies beyond the scope of personal experience.

The film sensitively and honestly presents a shaky crisis that the director's family is going through. It is a "story from life" that anyone can connect with and identify with. It is recommended!