Yehuda Almagor
LEMON TREE meets JOHN LE CARRÉ in a subtle thriller set in Germany involving Mona, a Lebanese woman (Golshifteh Farahani), and Naomi, an Israeli Mossad agent (Neta Riskin) sent to protect their informant while recovering from plastic surgery for her new identity. Mona and Naomi - together for two weeks in a quiet apartment in Hamburg. A safe house. A shelter. No one saw what was coming, no one knew that this supposedly quiet fortnight would turn into an abyss and that shelter would need to be found elsewhere. The intimacy of the relationship that develops between the two women is exposed to the threat of terror that is engulfing the world today. In this game of deception, beliefs are questioned and choices are made that are not their own. And yet their fate takes a surprising turn in this suspense-laden, elegant neo-noir.
A financial schemer finds himself in the middle of an international scandal after he becomes a political adviser to the new Prime Minister of Israel.
"Intimate Grammar" is a sensitive study of an inner journey rich in detailed observation. A dysfunctional family and delayed puberty make life miserable for a pre-adolescent growing up in Jerusalem in the 1960's. The film, an adaptation of David Grossman's "The Book of Intimate Grammar", shows our hero, Aharon Kleinfeld, striving to survive his domineering mother, his anti-intellectual father and his own diminutive stature in a setting of a lower-middle-class housing development where gossip is rampant and appearances are all important.
When Mooky is fifteen, his beloved father dies a sudden death, and his place is taken by Yanek - an impulsive, rough, yet generous man who is regarded as a controversial figure due to his doings in the Holocaust in the Zonder Commando. He brutally invades Mooky's life and turns it upside-down. During Mookys teenage years, which are affected by his seductive mother Tinka, he deals with unfulfilled love for one girl and a dominated relationship with another. One day Mooky returns to his mother's home, deranged, and does something from which there is no turning back. Twenty years later, Mooky must decide whether to attend his mother's funeral and re-open his wounds of the past.
