Real Estate

Tamara and Adam are expecting their first child when they learn they have to leave their Tel Aviv apartment. They priced themselves out of the city long ago, so Tamara takes Adam to Haifa — his hometown — for a single day of viewings. One by one, strangers' homes open up in front of them: an elderly Ashkenazi couple's flat, a younger Mizrahi couple's, an Arab man's who works in hi-tech, an artist and healer's, a Russian couple's. And hovering over the whole day is the one apartment that would be perfect on paper — whose owner keeps putting off the appointment.

The house hunt slowly turns into an interrogation. Tamara is a graphic designer, born in Russia, barely in touch with her bohemian mother in Paris; she wants her child to be born into an actual home. Adam works as a courier after abandoning a promising career in music, knows everyone on his street, and it is exactly that ease that makes him unreliable. The film isn't about the housing market but about what sits behind it: two people's long-deferred decisions, and the gap between what they wanted and what they can afford. Adam's mother (Sarit Vino-Elad) becomes a confidante to both of them in a handful of scenes, while it becomes perfectly clear where her son got his temperament.

This is Anat Malz's first feature, which she also wrote and edited. She graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem; her graduation film Vida travelled to international festivals, including Clermont-Ferrand. Malz compresses everything into one day and a handful of apartments, and Omri Aloni's camera follows the couple at an almost documentary closeness — yet the film is scripted from the first frame to the last, a point lead actor Leib Lev Levin took care to make after a festival screening. Victoria Rosovsky makes her feature debut as Tamara.

The film won both Best Israeli Film and Best Screenplay in the Israeli competition of the Haifa International Film Festival, where the jury praised Malz for weaving "the pains of growing up with sharp humour" with a masterful hand. It has since travelled from Tokyo to New York, and Israeli critics held it up as a benchmark for the country's independent cinema. Its Hungarian premiere was at the Budapest Jewish Film Festival.