Yom Yom (DVD)

In Yom Yom, the second film in Amos Gitai's (Devarim, Kadosh) celebrated "City Trilogy," Israel's preeminent writer-director weaves, "a darkly comic tale of characters driven by divided loyalties and neurotic inhibitions" (The Village Voice) in the mixed nationality Mediterranean port city of Haifa. Featuring a top-flight ensemble cast, including multiple Israeli Academy Award® winner Moshe Ivgy (Munich) and stage legend (and 20s UFA child star) Hanna Meron (M), Yom Yom is a film of unusual wit, grace and insight.

In spite of blood ties to both Haifa's Jewish and Arab populations, Moshe (Ivgy) leads a rootless existence. Grown weary of his impatient wife Didi (Keren Mor) and ambivalent about his needy young mistress Grisha (Natali Atiya), the only relationships Moshe doesn't complicate are with his devoted parents, Jewish Hanna (Meron) and Arab Yussuf, and with Jules (Juliano Mer), Moshe's ne'r-do-well childhood friend. But when Jules' real estate developer brother moves to buy a prized piece of property from the Arab side of the family, Moshe's divided ancestry is put to the test. As Moshe becomes entangled in the hidden connections between friend, wife, lover, parent, Arab and Jew, Yom Yom, "exploits the comedy of Moshe's predicament without robbing the character of his dignity" (The New York Times).

From boudoir to bakery to army barracks, "Gitai's genius," wrote The Village Voice "is to show the conflict infiltrating every encounter." Underneath its deadpan surface, Yom Yom is a film of incisiveness and energy that places an individual face on a city's divided identity, and reveals the heart beneath anonymous modern ennui.