Late Marriage

Zaza is thirty-one, the son of a Georgian Jewish family living in Israel. His family wants him married, and the rules for it are clear: the girl must be young, a virgin, from a good family. His parents drag him to introduction dinners and Zaza wrecks it somehow every time. What the family does not know is that Zaza is already with a divorced woman who has a six-year-old daughter. It is Dover Koshashvili's first film, and it tells his own community from inside; the person playing the mother is his actual mother. The film neither defends the tradition nor caricatures it; it shows the family's pressure mixed up with love, because that is what it is. The long scene in the middle takes place in Zaza and Judith's flat and became one of the most discussed scenes in Israeli cinema. Lior Ashkenazi and Ronit Elkabetz play the couple. The ending offers no easy act of defiance.