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.
