Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace, deemed the best Israeli film of the year, tackles with mild irony a very topical issue that of AIDS. The film tells the story of a desperate love between two men or rather between a boy and a man in modern Tel Aviv.Jonathan (17) works in a home for autistic children and lives alone in an apartment which he really intended as the love nest for him and his boyfriend Micky. But Micky goes his own way, after saddling Jonathan with several boring lodgers who sully and smash up his flat. The attractive New Yorker Thomas (in his thirties) is visiting his mother and grandmother who live in the same block as Jonathan. Thomas is seropositive but keeps it a secret from his surroundings. He has travelled to his parents to find peace, but is confronted with the misery of an everyday life in which the only shadow is that of the Holocaust.Jonathan and Thomas meet and for Jonathan it is love at first sight. Thomas is much more reserved; he is living without any prospects. The bond between Thomas and Jonathan is of necessity only temporary. An inevitable death stands in way of complete surrender. Jonathan gets to know Thomas's melancholy family better and acquires an insight into an aspect of Israeli life which had previously escaped him.