“The Good Soul”, director Eitan Aner’s fourth film, about a debt-ridden film producer (Moran Rosenblatt), who gets an opportunity to direct a celebrated ex-director who has returned to repentance and become a rabbi (Rami Hoiberger), is released on Thursday this week, and I ask him three questions about the beginning – Did you manage to inform Uri Zohar that he was your inspiration for designing the character of the rabbi, why now a film that is almost entirely black and white and did you think of Brecht when you called your film “The Good Nefesh”?
“I’ll start with the third question,” suggests Anar. “The connection to Brecht is not accidental. There is a film within a film in which Uri Gottlieb is seen directing Brecht’s ‘The Good Soul from Sichuan’ and to differentiate between the films, the main plot is filmed in black and white, which I think has high aesthetic values and the secondary, supposedly invested More – in color. As for Uri Zohar – I never met him, but before my eyes stood the image of his friend, Mordechai Arnon, remembered as Popik, whom I encountered at the age of 10.”
“Uri Zohar is not a figure in my life as much as I see him as one of the people on whose shoulders I stand as a director who created Israeli cinema,” he adds. “I can speak highly of his and Kishon’s films, but there is no denying the fact that when they started making films, I was introduced to cinema as a child. And the fact that the film is mostly in black and white corresponds with ‘Hole in the Brick’, ‘Three Days and a Boy’ and ‘Big Eyes’, Three films that are the core of Uri Zohar’s filmmaking and were shot in black and white.”
“The good soul” (Photo: Guy Saaf)
According to Aner, his film was shot during the Corona period, between the second and third closures and “as in the reality of that time, which required a very high mutual guarantee, the film concerns a joint project of a secular Tel Avivian and a converted ultra-Orthodox Jerusalemite, who come to him from completely different worlds.”
Why did you choose Shaul and Balath Ha’av for the story of the film within the film?
“It’s no coincidence. When I grew up in Jerusalem in the 1970s, the Bible was part of the landscape and in many respects we were in it with the feeling that we were neighbors of the biblical characters, who were part of the world of my imagination. Among them was Saul, who with all the internal contradictions in him was An excellent character for the cinema, which is illustrated in his story with the owner of the ove.”
The 53-year-old Aner is originally from Jerusalem. His father worked in the Prime Minister’s Office and his mother – in the National Library. He wasn’t a movie-boy until eighth grade and the bug stung him when the film class opened at his school. “There was an element of magic and fun in it, which attracted me, but at that time I had not yet imagined that I would work in cinema,” he says.
After military service in 8200, when he was debating between studying law and studying cinema, he chose the second option: “It was partly due to the influence of being a friend of one of the three daughters of the director Ram Levy, from whom I unofficially learned a lot. Among other things, I was on the set of the TV movie.” A crown on your head’ and I marveled at the crazy amount of love he showered on the star of his film, Avner Hezekiah and other actors.”
Eitan Aner (Photo: Yana Matas)
Di, following what he saw there, turned to film studies in the third cycle at Sam Spiegel. At the age of 23, while studying there, he participated in his first job writing sketches for “Motash”, from where he was quickly fired. In 2004, Anar directed his first feature film, “Riki Riki”, with a script by Dalit Kahn, who also starred in it alongside Gila Almagor, The queen of cinema, the one and only. “To direct her age at the beginning was a tremendous gift,” notes Anar.
“She’s just a lovely woman, without playing her the queen and it didn’t bother her at all, with her enormous experience, to work with a young director, which was his first feature – and this in a very, very funny role. In fact, I was lucky with actors, after being in the film My next, ‘A half-Russian story’, I had Kushnir and in the next film – ‘A very quiet heart’ – I was blessed with the participation of Anya Bukstein, who brought her musicality to the film. Now, as mentioned, Rami Hoiberger and Moran Rosenblatt.”
Anar has been living in Tel Aviv for a long time with his wife, the director and actress Tamar Kinan and their sons, 16 and 8 years old. Two directors under one roof. “That’s how it turned out,” he comments. They still don’t have a film together, but “we are running a writing course for actors on behalf of Shaham, the screen actors’ union.”
How do you deal with reviews?
“Very bad. I know I have a difficult job with the new film, but that’s part of the matter, which shouldn’t interfere with the fact that the next film, the fifth in number, is on the way.”