Directed by Nir Bergman

With Evelyne Kaplun, Yehuda Almagor

Israel, 2010

110 min.

Hebrew with English Subtitles

Aharon is a boy who refuses to grow up—not in the Peter Pan way, but like a distant relative of Oskar, the young boy in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum who stops growing due to uncomfortable circumstances. Aharon is the young son of the Kleinfeld family of Jerusalem in the early 1960s. With a senile grandmother, an absent-minded father, a bitter and domineering mother, friends who compete over his young romantic desires and echoes of the Holocaust in the background, Aharon has stopped developing on the outside even as he creates an exaggerated inner world where a bizarre language takes over reality. By turns melancholy and poetic, allegorical and painfully real, Intimate Grammar brings together two great talents who have excelled in the creation of moving stories about adolescents: author David Grossman (on whose The Book of Intimate Grammar the film is based), one of the most internationally celebrated Israeli voices (See Under: Love, Someone to Run With); and filmmaker Nir Bergman, whose depictions of young lives include the poignant Broken Wings (developed from his short Sea Horses, SFJFF 2004) and the character of the troubled teen athlete of In Treatment (SFJFF 2009). Intimate Grammar won the Sakura Grand Prix at the Tokyo International Film Festival. —Donny Inbar

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