Israeli Archives – Laemmle Theatres

In 1970s Rhode Island, all cold grays and blues, a mother dies in hospital, and her estranged adult daughter barely feels anything. In a 1930s moshav in British Mandate Palestine, all vibrant colors as memories tend to be, a widower hires an attractive newcomer to be his housekeeper. These are different women, yet their stories entwine a family mystery in Guido Chiesa’s For the Love of a Woman.

Catch For the Love of a Woman at Laemmle’s Royal and Town Center 5 starting Friday, July 10^th. Star Mili Avital will participate in Q&A’s after the 7:00 p.m. Royal show on July 11, as well as the 1:00 p.m. TC5 show and the 4:00 p.m. Royal show on July 12.

For the Love of a Woman is loosely based on Meir Shalev’s novel The Loves of Judith, also known as As a Few Days or The Four Meals, but it adds a lot in the adaptation. Only the scenes set in the ’30s are from the novel, though the format of nesting stories remains the same, turning the book’s wraparound narrative into the story being uncovered by the new framing device, set 40 years later and invented for the film. Director Chiesa, an Italian immigrant who worked with Michael Cimino and Jim Jarmusch, has turned the story from a riff on Jewish folktales to a meditation on the immigrant experience. What does a person lose when they leave the homeland…and how might they find it again?

Mili Avital, the acclaimed Israeli actress whose Hollywood breakthrough was as the female lead in Stargate, plays Esther, a middle-aged woman who is handed a mystery upon her mother’s death. Prior to succumbing to dementia she left Esther a letter and a piece of jewelry, telling her to take it to Israel and look for the name “Judith.” With the assistance of a family friend who lives there, she discovers an old farmhouse, and under pretense of wanting to buy it, meets the heir, a university professor (Ori Pfeffer) whose actual given name is Zayde, or “Grandpa.”

As Esther asks more questions about the house, Zayde reveals his own family history, mostly focusing on the quirky circumstances that led to his having three fathers. All of them pined for one woman, Yehudit, or Judith (played by Romanian actress Ana Ularu), who had a secret backstory of her own. Moshav communities, like kibbutzes, involve shared resources and collectivism; this story humorously suggests that might extend to women too. Yet Yehudit is nobody’s property; she owns her sexuality, and the men eventually fall in line. Especially when she gives birth to Zayde (standing up, no less!), without knowing which of her triptych of lovers is the dad. “Who does he look like?” they ask. “Me,” she responds.

Chiesa’s filmography consists primary of Italian films, sometimes depicting political/historical moments, as in Working Slowly (Radio Alice) or Johnny the Partisan, and sometimes comedies both romantic and family-related, like 30 Nights With My Ex or Belli di Papa. Taking on an English-language movie about the Israeli immigrant experience is a bold leap, but he draws on his experience with both family complications and political history, along with his own experience as an import, to reveal that sometimes there is universality in the specifics.

Ties to two cultures can make a person’s life feel divided; different people bridge the divide in different ways, but it all stems from the same root feeling. One need not be either Italian or Israeli to connect to the journeys Esther and Zayde take, and their realizations that key elements of their pasts have been missing. For the Love of a Woman reveals that there may be sorrow in the lost connections, but there’s joy in making new ones, and the former can directly fuel the latter.

“With a moving story, beautiful direction and a cast and crew that execute with precision this is a film not to be missed.” – Ricky Archuleta, Film Threat

“Some films sweep you away with breathtaking action. Others quietly capture your heart. For the Love of a Woman belongs firmly in the second category, blending romance, mystery and family history into a thoughtful, emotionally rewarding film.” – Mira Temkin, Splash

If there’s a unifying impulse in Nadav Lapid’s cinema, it’s refusal: refusal of comfort, of distance, and of the idea that art can stand apart from the conditions that produce it. In Yes!, his most confrontational film to date, that refusal takes on a new intensity. What begins in manic, almost grotesque satire gradually reveals itself as something closer to an existential reckoning, a film less interested in persuading its audience than in exhausting it.

Catch Yes! in theaters beginning April 2nd at the Laemmle Glendale.

Set in the aftermath of October 7th, Yes! centers on Y, a pianist living in Tel Aviv with his wife and their young child. They are ambitious, affectionate, and acutely attuned to the possibilities of upward mobility. Their strategy is simple: ingratiate themselves with powerful individuals. Moving through parties, performances, and private gatherings, they attach themselves to a network of political, military, and cultural elites, saying “yes” to every opportunity, every demand, every unspoken expectation.

Lapid renders this ascent in a style that is deliberately overwhelming. The film’s early passages unfold in a rush of movement and noise: faces contort, bodies thrash, images veer toward the surreal. Satire here is neither cool nor distancing but feverish, almost desperate. Moments of comedy land uneasily, often collapsing into something more abrasive. The effect is one of constant destabilization, as though the film itself were struggling to contain its own anger.

At the center of it all is Ariel Bronz’s Y, a figure defined by his almost-superhuman capacity for acquiescence. He absorbs the rhetoric around him without question, reshaping himself to fit the expectations of those in power. His ambition—to be seen, to succeed, to matter—drives him forward, even as it erodes any stable sense of self. What Lapid tracks, with increasing severity, is not a moral awakening but the consequences of its absence. Y does not so much choose a path as slide into it, one “yes” at a time.

What distinguishes Yes! is its refusal to offer release. Lapid does not build toward catharsis, nor does he grant his characters the dignity of clear transformation. Instead, he circles a more troubling idea: that complicity is rarely dramatic, rarely declared, but incremental, shaped by small concessions that accumulate over time.

The lingering effect of Yes! is less the shock of its imagery than the persistence of its central idea. Lapid’s film doesn’t argue so much as confront, exploring what it means to live alongside catastrophe, to filter it, to rationalize it, or simply to keep moving. The answers remain unresolved, but the implication is clear enough: indifference is not a neutral position.

“You can hear the rage behind the laughter in Israeli satire Yes… [Lapid] almost seems to bait you to look away, to turn off and tune out just like his revelers, even as he inexorably pulls you in.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“A whirling, maximalist satire… Exhilaratingly of the moment and in the moment.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“Deliriously provocative, a veritable orgy of self-loathing.” – David Ehrlich, Indiewire

Mystery and the Immigrant Experience in Guido Chiesa’s ‘For the Love of a Woman’

Only ‘Yes!’: Inside Nadav Lapid’s Existential Howl

Laemmle Theatres