Alex Is Lovesick

The film tells of Israel in the late fifties through the eyes of Alex, who is just turning thirteen. His mother is protective and overbearing in the classic manner, his schoolfriends are boys hustling in the street, and his headmaster is a nervous Russian immigrant. The speech of the street is full of Polish, Russian and Persian slang, and the expressions that later entered everyday language come from this milieu. The film gives the leaving of childhood not as a ceremony but as an everyday confusion. The account does not recall the period with longing; it records the mixture of languages and habits among immigrant families. The music is chosen entirely from American records of those years. It came to be counted among the known works of Israeli cinema. Eitan Anshel plays the lead in Boaz Davidson’s eighty eight minute Israeli film, completed in 1986.