Posted: 11/05/2007

Sweet Mud

(2007)

by Sawyer J. Lahr

Israel’s submission to the Academy Awards and winner of Best Foreign Film at Sundance is as universal in its visual language and sound design as City of God.

It is a coming of age drama unlike E.T., IT, Indian in the Cupboard, or Simon Birch in the U.S. The film is more like Angela’s Ashes in its tone because it is the writer/director Dror Shaul’s personal memoir.

A young Jewish boy, Dvir (Tomer Steinhof), has the misfortune of growing up in a 1970s repressive cult-like closed community, known in Israel as a kibbutz.

Kibbutzim today encourage more individualism and art according to a representative of the Chicago Israeli Consulate in attendance at the city’s Israeli Film Festival this year.

The autobiographical film depicts the writer’s grim experiences, bringing to light the subject of violence in this fundamental orthodox Jewish kibbutz community.

Little Dvir must grow up fast. His mother, Miri (Ronit Yudkevitz) is a presence in his life but only so much as he is able to leave the dormitory where children must live and learn separate from their families.

Sweet Mud is an appropriate oxymoron because the film is nostalgic and funny such as how the village reacts to Miri’s older retired French boyfriend, Stephan.

On the contrary, all the boy’s efforts to give his mother the means to leave the kibbutz and be with Stephan in France are challenged as much as his small, innocent voice encourages her out of disabling depression.

A deep entanglement shackles Miri to the abusive way an influential Kibbutz leader takes advantage of her and is implied to be involved in someone’s death.

Drifting shots of wide plains and meadows that surround the settlement capture the country-side of Israel. The world beyond the kibbutz microcosm is suggested only by the bus stop representing personal loss.

Although freedom may be a bus ride away, there are times that the appeal of greater civilization feels like an escape to the same.

Nothing is rushed about the performances or scene duration. Dvir and his mother are allowed time to fully internalize and externalize the repressed traumas and handicaps of Dvir’s family on its last legs.

Sawyer J. Lahr is a film reviewer living in Chicago.

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