Ben Zaken

GRAND PRIX JANINE BAZIN BEST FEATURE FILM

Three generations of the Ben Zaken family live together in a small apartment in the outskirts of the seaside city of Ashkelon. Dina generously busies herself with helping her sons Leon and Schlomi. While the first works as the director of a construction business, the second barely manages to survive between a precarious employment situation and taking care of his 11 year old daughter Ruhi, a hypersensitive girl and a tormented soul. Ben Zaken falls within the kind of Israeli filmmaking that looks at a dysfunctional society with a centripetal and critical eye — this family constituting a sharp and painful allegory of such a society. Efrat Corem depicts frontally the characters struggling with a deep-seated angst, while he lets the film’s absent figures resonate —Ruhi’s mother and Dina’s husband, the father of the two sons.
(Arnaud Hée)