Here is a film made by a filmmaker who does not bother with preliminary explanations and projects us into the disorder of his family and marital history and his artistic haircuts in twelve to the point that we take a little time -even to sort through this jumble where the autobiographical elements are doubled by an embryo of fiction then by a bereaved meta film, renewing with alter egos the situation really lived and which changed the project of the film that we see. Everyone follows? Better for once spoiler the project to see the work. So Dani Rosenberg, a young filmmaker, gets a grant to shoot a fiction whose subject is Israel’s fear of being bombed by Iran. His father, Natan Rosenberg, plays the main role, an atrabilatory and paranoid character embarking his family in a car for Jerusalem, a sacred site that “Muslims are not going to destroy”. But Natan discovers liver cancer which ends up taking him away. His son then transforms the project into a complex and sometimes overly complicated fiction on the pain of the loss of the father and the film, on the obsession to shoot when nothing is going right, the ironic anguish of the first story on the declaration of war coming from Iran giving way to a more concrete panic in the face of the disease. The filmmaker hires producer Marek Rozenbaum to play his father, renamed Yoel Edelstein, and Roni Kuban to hold that of the son, Asaf, obsessive and clumsy. Two women observe and criticize this male pair, Asaf’s partner, pregnant and neglected, and the fictitious and real wife of Yoel/Natan, Ina Rosenberg.
Weaving together the different layers of narratives – the filming of the film within the film, the images of the real agony of his father, the home-movie clips shot over time with his Super 8 camera, flashing the real thing and reconstructing it in flipping the other exasperated Natan Rosenberg and his fictionalized “replacement” Yoel Edelstein – the Death of the cinema and of my father too translates the incredible mess of intentions, misunderstandings, collusion, successful, missed or forgotten events that form the framework of an inaugural experience (shooting your first “real” film) or a farewell to existence (knowing oneself condemned by the inexorable progression of pathology). Neither the son nor the father are particularly to be rescued or loved, both lost in the tangled system of their exhausting sadomaso dependency of filiation and autofiction. The exercise is a touching confession and a great neurotic unpacking, as when the filmmaker’s wife reproaches him for his immaturity and his absences at moments as crucial as his first ultrasound, or when the mother faints while her husband chooses the funeral urn where he wants to store his ashes, the registers of drama and comedy surging from one sequence to the next in a continuum of uncertain and sometimes more traumatic moments of being relieved of any importance or gravity.
