One Week and a Day

Eyal and Vicky have just come to the end of the week of mourning for the son they lost to cancer. Vicky wants to go back to work the next morning and put life back on its routine. Eyal cannot. Instead he goes to collect something left behind at the hospital, then ends up hanging around with Zooler, the young man next door, and spends the day somewhere he never planned to be. Asaph Polonsky's first film tells grief not as a ceremony but as a day: coffee, arguments with a neighbour, a lost object, and unbearable moments arriving in between. Comedy and sorrow share the same scene and neither one suppresses the other. The film screened in Critics' Week at Cannes in 2016 and took a distribution prize there; in Jerusalem it was named best Israeli debut. Shai Avivi is in the lead.