Everlasting Joy

Uriel Morag, a retired general with a glorious past that includes some less than glorious episodes, has, like many other army officers, graduated into an executive ministerial job. Self-important, overweight and - in his own mind - indispensable, he heads for the countryside with Mona, his latest bimbo, for a weekend away. But as he drives his BMW towards the village farm of two friends from his military past, he and his love are transported into a twisted Through The Looking Glass-style version of present day Israel.

Solomon Belfer, child who arrives to kibbutz after his father fled the country. He dreames of the moment when his father sent him a plane ticket, and he will leave the kibbutz. Meanwhile, he lies in his room and refuses to join the life of the community ...

A working-class guy meets the beautiful model from the billboard. But a few more people are involved. Here, the guy is married and his daughter has a crush on the weatherman. The weatherman wants to marry the cosmetics queen from the billboards. The cosmetics queen kind of likes the guy's sidekick. The sidekick kind of likes the guy's daughter, although she's in high school and the age difference would raise anyone's eyebrows.

The film presents fascist ideologies since the beginning of the 20th Century. The actor/presenter of Maurice Barrés argues against foreign labor on the Tel Aviv beach. Mussolini in a gym. Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera in a bookshop. Carl Schmitt at court. Abba Ahimeir and Itamar Ben-Avi in a public library. Gudrun Streiter recalls her love affair with an SA Stormtrooper with Hitler and Himmler on a bench in a park. Three Rabbis from the Yitzhar Settlement on the West Bank: Shapira, Ginzburg and Elitzur have recently ruled that “there is a reason to kill a child if it is clear that it will grow to harm us” (Torat Hamelekh, 2009, pg. 207). They too appear and discuss their interpretation of Divine commands on a park bench.

Three IDF soldiers on a routine patrol in the early 1980s in occupied Hebron.

Claire was my childhood love. I heard Yonatan, a kibbutznik, lecturing on Marx and Tolstoy the day we both enlisted. Jacques was a painter; the sergeant major ordered him to smear the cannons with grease so they would shine in the parade. I met Hanoch after the army; every morning I would wake to the clatter of his typewriter—he was then writing "Solomon Grip." With Shmuel I played chess; I loved the quiet that accompanied the game. Era, the editor, was my cinematic conscience. My friends are no longer here. But I still speak to them through the memories.

An evening in a small café in a working-class suburb of Tel-Aviv. Men and women from the neighbourhood go there, in search of solidarity. The local singer Doron Meran joins them. His oriental music offers them a few moments of ecstasy and oblivion. The film was inspired by Franz Kafka's letters that were written between 1912 and 1917 to his fiancee Felice Bauer.