THE MATCHMAKER
Travel to Israel this weekend to find love in Avi Nesher's THE MATCHMAKER! The winner of 7 Israeli Academy Awards - including Best Picture - THE MATCHMAKER joins youth, love, and community together in one enjoyable and remarkable film. The film creates a compelling coming-of-age story for both a boy and a nation.
"A memory play gold-dusted with adolescent longing and a strong sense of fable, THE MATCHMAKER seems singular among Israeli features in the way it juxtaposes guilt with hope, national birth pains with youthful hubris."
-John Anderson, VARIETY
"THE MATCHMAKER is a quirky, magical Israeli film about an unusual matchmaker, told through the eyes of a teenage boy. This crowd-pleaser was the audience favorite at the New York Israeli Film Festival."
-Cate Marquis, JEWISH LIGHT
Arik, a teenage boy growing up in Haifa in 1968, gets a job working for Yankele Bride, a matchmaker. Yankele, a mysterious Holocaust survivor, has an office in back of a movie theater that shows only love stories, run by a family of seven Romanian dwarves in the seedy area by the port. Yankele introduces Arik to a new world, build on the ruins of an old one. As Arik begins to learn the mysteries of the human heart through his work with Yankele, he falls in love with Tamara, his friend Beni's cousin. Tamara has just returned from America and is full of talk of women's rights, free love and rock and roll. The disparate parts of Arik's life collide in unexpected, often funny and very moving ways as he lives through a summer that changes him forever.
Directed Avi Nesher. Unrated.
Israel, 2012, Digital Projection, 112minutes, Color, Hebrew with English Subtitles.