The Death of Cinema and My Father Also

 I just had a chance to view The Death of Cinema and My Father Also, by Dani Rosenberg.  It is a quirky comedy-drama about a filmmaker and his relationship with his dying father.  This is not a regular feature film with a linear plot line.  Rather, it is an episodic and touching look at family issues -- grappling with the upcoming death of the father, aging, and divorce -- and it combines many different elements which are all put together in an arty and rather disjointed fashion. 

The different elements include: home movies by the filmmaker when he was young, short films made by the filmmaker using his own family, real footage of the dying father and also the rest of the family, and sequences which are dramatized after the father’s passing.

The film is a low-budget exercise, filled with touching and poignant scenes.  Rosenberg had originally received a grant from one of the film funds to make a film about Israel’s paranoia concerning the possibility of an all-out war with Iran.  This film was going to star his father, who had starred in many of his previous shorts.  When the father takes seriously ill, this story is scrapped, but Rosenberg is still interested in trying as hard as possible to document what he can from his father’s last few months.  He continues filming him, even when all the filmmaking is obviously distressing for the father. 

My favorite scene is when the filmmaker’s three-year-old son is participating in a dramatized scene in which the actor who is playing the dying father has a terrible case of shortness of breath.  The little boy says: grandpa wasn’t able to breathe.  The mother tells him: but you know that he’s not really your grandpa, he’s an actor.  The little boy responds: I know that but I felt bad for him because he couldn’t breathe!

This is a film which portrays cinema’s capacity for helping us remember and focus on those loved ones whom we have lost, helping us to commemorate their lives, and to try to move forward. 

Dani Rosenberg is a talented filmmaker.  When he was a film student at the Sam Spiegel Jerusalem Film School, he made a great film, The Red Toy (2004), about an Arab boy living in the Old City of Jerusalem, which made a big impression on me. 

The Death of Cinema and My Father Also (2020, 104 minutes) directed by Dani Rosenberg, is an Israel-France co-production.