Intimate Grammar

The film is set in Jerusalem in the nineteen sixties, in a lower middle class housing development. Aharon Kleinfeld is a boy whose puberty is late, and a body that will not grow sets him apart from the others his age. At home there is a domineering mother and a father with no use for books. Gossip travels fast in the neighbourhood and how you look counts for everything. Inside that closing in, Aharon builds a language of his own, and the film takes its name from it. The account does not describe the boy’s inner world from outside; it stays there with him. The film was adapted from a novel by David Grossman. Roee Elsberg, Orly Zilberschatz and Yehuda Almagor appear in Nir Bergman’s hundred and ten minute Israeli film, completed in 2010.