Broken Wings

Screening: Monday 27 July, 6:30pm

Nir Bergman | Israel | 2002 | DV | M offensive language, sexual references, drug use

A moving, perceptive picture of family dynamics thrown into chaos by the loss of an adored father. Nir Bergman’s tellingly detailed script illuminates the volatile density of family relationships with a clarity that is as rare as it is gratifying.

An Israeli film that could take place in any first world city, Broken Wings is a moving, acutely perceptive picture of family dynamics thrown into chaos by the loss, nine months earlier, of an adored father and husband. Dominated by the rocky relationship of mother and teenage daughter, the family is redefining itself through trial and error. Dafna, the mother, struggling to make ends meet, works as a midwife, leaving 17-year-old Maya to act as surrogate mother to 11-year-old Ido and 6-year-old Bahr.

Brother Yair has dropped out of school at 16 and found a job commensurate with his world-view, handing out leaflets, dressed as a giant mouse. Maya is a promising songwriter, but the boys in the band consider her family duties a cop-out. Her fury at this injustice provokes a crisis of heart-stopping suspense: the anxiety for emotional rescue becomes almost palpable. The actors thrive with writer/director Nir Bergman’s tellingly detailed script and illuminate the volatile density of family relationships with a clarity that is as rare as it is gratifying. — Bill Gosden.

Bergman’s script is a small wonder of elegant economy, judiciously investing in little Bahr’s melancholy, Yair’s life-is-meaningless platform (toppled when a volatile girlfriend stands on a window ledge and asks if he still thinks she’s ‘a speck of dust’), and Dafna’s first painfully awkward fumblings toward new romance. Warm yet clear-eyed and droll, always emphatic, never lugubrious, the film earns its unexpected ending many times over. — Jessica Winter, Time Out

(87 minutes, In Hebrew with English subtitles, DVD)