Screening: Sunday 19 November, 18.15 NFT 2
Etz hadomin tafus is the sequel to Eli Choen's 1988 film, The Summer of Avia, based on Gila Almagor's first autobiographical novel, which follows the story of Avia who tries to cope with the emotional imbalance of her mother who lost her husband in the Holocaust. The book was well received and the author adapted it successfully for the stage, the production of which was hailed as a personal triumph for Almogar, who played the lead role. The play then became a screenplay and Almagor wrote, produced and played Avia's mother in the film, which went on to win a Silver Bear in Berlin.
Etz hadomin tafus now follows Avia four years after her first summer. Her mother has been committed to a mental hospital and Avia is in a kibbutz boarding school with other children of her age, all of whom bear emotional and physical scars from WW2 and are living through the ensuing struggle to gain a state of their own and establish there a new national identity.
Almagor once again takes a pivotal role in the production, producing, co-writing the script and playing the part of Avia's mother. As a producer, she is a stickler for details. "There is not one single synthetic fibre in our costumes" she declares, trying to give her young cast the true feeling of the period.
Casting for the film took a year, Almagor intensively searching for the right faces and right attitudes to fit into the period, not to mention the correct foreign accents, similar to those of her schoolmates at that time. The one role confirmed from the word "go" was Kaipo Cohen as Avia. Her performance in the previous film was a personal triumph and she is practically identified with the part.
"Unlike The Summer of Avia, where everything revolved around the mother-daughter relationship, here the mother is a marginal figure, the focus being on Avia and her contact with children of her own age, all of them badly scarred and attempting to use their personal tragedies as a springboard to emotional maturity. The boarding school is the only real home these kids have, but as warm and receptive as it is, it allows for no privacy at all," explains Almagor. "Therefore the domim tree becomes the symbol of an evergreen space for one to be on his own."
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