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Sometimes the plans we have come up with are thwarted by events in our lives out of our control and while trying to cope with the situation as well as its consequences, we may discover a much bigger narrative than we have anticipated, one which involves ourselves and how we live and our relationships to others. When director Dani Rosenberg was in pre-production for a project titled “The Night Escape”, his main cast member, his father Natan Rosenberg was diagnosed with terminal cancer and his health deteriorated quickly, making it impossible for him to even shoot one scene. Rather than abandoning the project altogether, the camera became Rosenberg’s companion, recording the conversations, at times heated arguments he had with his parents, resulting in “The Death of Cinema and My Father Too”, a blend of family drama and meta-film.

“The Death of Cinema and My Father Too” is screening at...

Quelle surprise. The Cannes 2020 label anoints two Israeli films from male directors, both about father-son relationships and grieving. The superior by a country mile is the seamlessly accomplished “Here We Are” from veteran helmer-writer Nir Bergman. And then there is the grandiosely titled “The Death of Cinema and My Father Too,” an ambitious, low-budget exercise from feature debutant Dani Rosenberg that offers a sometimes artful but more often self-indulgent mashup of fiction, reality and home movies. Although definitely not for all tastes, the Cannes designation may nudge this item into further fests and niche sales.

As we learn from watching, “The Death of Cinema” is the result of a complicated evolution. Earlier, Rosenberg, a Sam Spiegel Film School graduate, received a grant from the Israel Film Fund to make “The Night Escape,” a comic drama that would exploit both national and personal paranoias. He planned to cast his businessman father Natan in the lead.

Israeli multi-hyphenate Dani Rosenberg marks his feature debut with “The Death of Cinema and my Father Too,” a self-reflexive hybrid film that mixes fact, fiction and autobiography as it grapples with the big questions.

Presented under the Cannes 2020 label and sold internationally by Films Boutique, the film follows a rising director as he tracks his father’s final days, camera in hand, telling a story culled from Rosenberg’s experience and interspersed with footage from his own life.

“I prefer to call it a fiction film that crashes into the walls of reality,” says Rosenberg. “The narrative itself is fictional, and I used documentary elements from my life to create parallels with this story.”

“I started to make a film with my father once he fell ill,” he explains. “We shot a couple days, and then he felt too weak, so we canceled the shoot. Later, when I wrote and shot this film,...