In the battle of competing Israeli film festivals, the Haifa Film Festival was always regarded as the small, less interesting of the two. The films selected for Haifa were either: the ones that the Jerusalem Film Festival had rejected, or the ones that weren’t ready in time. In recent years, the organizers at Haifa have bent the rules so that films that didn’t have a finished 35mm print, could still participate. That way, films far from the main stream found their way to center stage (as was the case with last year’s winner, Seven Minutes in Heaven, and Frozen Days, the 2006 winner).
This year’s competition included what should have been a sure-fire winner in The Mission of the Human Resources Manager (a five Ophir award winner), but final outcome of the competition was a surprising one, with The Flood (a.k.a Mabul), screened from a HD copy (helmer Guy Nattiv was stuck in a Canadian airport with the finished film copy) managed to win the festival’s Best Picture award.
The Flood proved to be a warm, crowd-pleaser, with superb performances especially from veteran actress Ronit Elkabetz (The Band’s Visit) and Michael Moshonov (Lebanon). The biggest surprise was Nattiv’s mature and moderate pacing — a fluid directing hand that tremendously helped the unraveling of this tale about a dysfunctional family disintegrating to even smaller pieces as the elder autistic son unexpectedly comes into their lives again. This could have easily been a hysterical movie, but Nattiv rises to the occasion, delivering a delicate and moving film. Mabul is looking at a winter (Jan-Feb) domestic release here in Israel.
