While Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid been working for years with lots of acclaim (2011’s “Policeman” was very well-regarded and 2014’s “The Kindergarten Teacher” was so good, Maggie Gyllenhaal decided to produce and star in a 2018 remake), the filmmaker seemed to make an even bigger splash on the international scene with “Synonyms” which won the Golden Bear, and the FIPRESCI Award at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival and introduced more audiences to wiry star Tom Mercier.
READ MORE: ‘Ahed’s Knee’: A Searing Autobiographical Takedown Of Corrupt Government [Cannes Review]
Lapid returned last year with “Ahed’s Knee,” which made its world premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Prize(shared with the Tilda Swinton-starring “Memoria”). The film, which was also an official selection title at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival stars Nur Fibak and Avshalom Pollak and tells a meta-esque story about an Israeli filmmaker who throws himself in the midst of two battles doomed to fail: one against the death of freedom, the other against the death of a mother.
Y., an Israeli filmmaker in his mid-forties, arrives in a remote village at the far end of the desert to present one of his films. There he meets Yahalom, an officer for the Ministry of Culture, and finds himself fighting two losing battles: one against the death of freedom in his country, the other against the death of his mother.
As noted in our Cannes review, the film is autobiographical in nature and somewhat based on the death of Lapid’s mother. “grief looms large over ‘Ahed’s Knee,’ in the form of long, slow iPhone-filmed shots of desert landscapes, sent as missives to Y’s dying mother—the brief reprieves from the noise that Lapid offers in an otherwise sonically-heavy film.”
Now, Kino Lorber will open “Ahed’s Knee” on March 18 and have released the first trailer which you can watch below.