Daniel Auerbach

Filmmaker Daniel Auerbach lives with his cat in a run-down apartment in Tel Aviv. He is broke and struggles to write a script which is supposed to be a testimony of his own life. Coming from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family, he became secular at a young age but has paid a heavy price for abandoning his community ever since. His family turned their backs on him, while he got caught in an endless fight with his inner self that triggered many neuroses and obsessions, sexual and otherwise.

David Volach's splendid autobiographical feature is probably the most honest and uncompromising take on the Jewish identity versus the Israeli identity. It is the clash between the two that fuels Daniel's radical self-criticism, his unconventional humour and his desperate need to question everything, including his relationships with God, women and his homeland. His outspoken, even outrageous comments on what it means to inhabit his various identities are hilarious and deeply tragic at once. Volach plays Auerbach with a quirky, unorthodox charm and natural lightness yet makes it painfully clear that the impossible entanglement of his alter-ego has no easy resolution, or perhaps, no resolution at all.

– Evgeny Gusyatinskiy