Who’s sorry now? Inside Israeli cinema’s Yom Kippur-inspired stories of guilt and redemption

Themes of guilt, redemption, sin, and atonement run through Israeli movies, many of which take their inspiration from Jewish life and Jewish religious texts and thought.

The theme of atonement is so ingrained in the Jewish/Israeli psyche that even comedies deal with it. A popular 2019 comedy is actually called Forgiveness, and tells the story of two friends (Guy Amir and Hanan Savyon) who get caught in a robbery; one flees while the other goes to prison. The guy who got away spends the years his buddy is incarcerated becoming religious, and when the friend is released, the newly pious robber tries to make amends.

The classic 1964 comedy about a Mizrahi immigrant, Sallah Shabati, by Ephraim Kishon, features a scene where the hero, played by Chaim Topol, rails against God for all his family’s suffering in their new land. It’s a cry for the Almighty to atone for his treatment of Sallah and his family, and is one of the most heartbreaking scenes in all of Israeli cinema.

Israeli filmmakers explore personal atonement

Certain directors have explored atonement deeply throughout their careers, and the director whose work comes to mind most readily is Avi Nesher. Although he burst onto the movie scene in Israel with two mostly comic films he made when he was in his early 20s, The Troupe and Dizengoff 99, with time, he has taken on more serious stories, although his films always mix comedy and tragedy.

His upcoming movie, Our Loves, to be released on October 15 in Israel and which will open the Haifa International Film Festival, has a central plot line about a father trying to redeem himself for abandoning his family. Shabi (Shalom Michaelshwilli) is a tough retired general, and his young adult daughter, Liri (Noa Cohen), adored him as a child, but now shuns him.

On October 6, 2023, he has a court date to try to force his ex-wife to sell the family home and move out, which upsets both his children. The following morning, their lives are turned upside down by the Hamas-led mega-attacks. Liri lives on a kibbutz near the Gaza border that is overrun by terrorists.

Shabi knows that only he can save her. He grabs a weapon and heads south, determined to rescue her, and along the way, he picks up four hopelessly incompetent but brave new recruits. The crisis brings him a chance for redemption.

What makes this storyline particularly interesting is that during that day, he must listen to others and make dozens of life-or-death decisions, and his atonement comes from learning to truly value other people, not simply his own bravery.

This echoes themes from Nesher’s other movies. The Other Story (2018) is also about a complex father-daughter relationship: a father (Yuval Segal) abandoned his daughter (Joy Rieger), moving to America to advance his career. He returns to Israel and tries to make amends when his daughter becomes haredi and plans to marry a man with a history of drug addiction.

His movie The Secrets is a 2007 film about an ultra-Orthodox girl (Ania Bukstein) who helps an older French woman (Fanny Ardant) who has committed a murder. The murderer is kind and treats the ultra-Orthodox girl like a daughter, and the story blurs all conventional thinking about guilt and innocence as the religious girl turns to kabbalah to purify the criminal seeking to atone for her crime.

In his 2016 movie – called Past Life in English but in Hebrew is actually known as Hahata’im, which translates as “the sins” – two sisters (Rieger and Nelly Tagar) travel to Poland to try to understand what their intimidating father did during the Holocaust, and end up seeing him in a new, complex light.

His 2010 movie, The Matchmaker, is about a boy who yearns to understand what his survivor father experienced during the war. The boy starts working for another Holocaust survivor (Adir Miller), a matchmaker, who seeks atonement by helping people find love.

From personal guilt to national atonement

WHILE NESHER’S films deal with personal atonement, other Israeli filmmakers have focused on political or national atonement. Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, an innovative, animated documentary from 2008, is about how Folman cannot remember fighting in the First Lebanon War when, in 1982, Christian militias massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. He goes on a quest to get his memories back by talking to other veterans, who are coping in different ways with their guilt over not preventing the massacre.

Eytan Fox’s 2004 Walk on Water tells the story of a Mossad agent who feels guilt over his wife’s suicide and by the actions he has taken in the line of duty. He eventually atones by opening up to a gay German man he is assigned to shadow, the grandson of a Nazi. Both the young German and the Mossad agent struggle with their feelings of guilt.

Samuel Maoz’s 2017 feature, Foxtrot, a controversial film, is about a group of nervous soldiers at an IDF outpost who accidentally kill a car full of unarmed Palestinians. They bury them in their car and hide all traces of the killing. The central character is the father (Lior Ashkenazi) of one of the soldiers, who is mistakenly told that his son has been killed in the line of duty, and then is informed that this was a mistake.

Ultimately, he does lose his son, which, in the moral compass of the film, is seen as a kind of punishment for the son’s actions, and the father tries to atone for sending his son off to the army. Two recent films have reiterated this theme of parental guilt over sending their children to war – Netalie Braun’s Oxygen and Eyal Halfon’s A Burning Man.

In most of the movies by Nadav Lapid, Israel’s most celebrated director abroad, his heroes fight the self-loathing linked to Israel’s rule over Palestinians. This is most notably the case in Synonyms, his movie that won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019. It centers on an Israeli in Paris who moves into an empty building and seems to be punishing himself by isolating himself and sticking to a bizarre routine.

Women directors have looked more to family and child-rearing to find stories of atonement. Ayelet Menahemi’s Seven Blessings – co-written by two of its actresses, Eleanor Sela and Reymonde Amsellem – is about a girl from a large family who was given to a childless aunt to raise, a once-common practice in Moroccan society.

She grew up confused about her identity and felt deep resentment. When the girl, now an adult, returns from Paris with her bridegroom to see her family in Israel, all the conflicts come to the surface as her mother and aunt struggle to explain and justify their actions.

In the recent film The Book of Ruth by Esty Shushan, a haredi man accidentally causes the death of his child, and tries to atone by being ever more pious, while his wife struggles to forgive him and finds herself becoming more independent and less strictly observant.

It’s a theme that Israeli filmmakers are likely to keep exploring in the coming years, particularly as more stories about October 7, 2023, come to light.