The Toronto Jewish Film Society recently re-screened Jonathan Paz’s 2006 Israeli film, The Galilee Eskimos, a light-hearted look at what happens to a group of senior citizens when the kibbutz they live in goes bankrupt.
The elderly group wake up one morning and slowly realize, after breakfast doesn’t come and the water is shut off, that everyone else seems to have left the kibbutz and they’ve been abandoned.
They’re not quite sure what’s going on. They don’t know that the kibbutz has been sold by the bank to a developer who wants to turn it into a Las Vegas-style resort.
This crass developer, shocked to find people still living on the kibbutz, does the math and figures out that if he can get a discount on the premises, he can still keep the senor citizens on the kibbutz for a year or two until they die, and turn a profit.
Left to fend for themselves, as one woman puts it, “left to die like Eskimos,” the residents try to make the best of a terrible situation. Without water, they bathe in the swimming pool, the men looking at the women and talking about their younger, virile days. One feeble woman packs her bags and says she’s going to take the bus to her cousin’s house “in Warsaw.”
Paz, who wrote and directed this movie, keeps everything light-hearted with comical situations and witty dialogue, but, as the theme of the movie implies, time marches forward, people age, kibbutzim are privatized and closed.
The Galilee Eskimos, starring an ensemble of veteran actors, is a bittersweet, critical look at Israel’s unique social experiment and also a paean to the indomitable Israeli spirit.
