Israeli filmmaker Tom Nesher channels her grief into her new movie ‘Come Closer’

"In the beginning, when I started working on the film, I was in a lot of pain, and I feel like making it was a way for me to find beauty and laughter and passion in life again, because it was like that was taken away from me,” said Tom Nesher, the director of Come Closer, her first feature film, which was released around Israel on Thursday.

The movie, which is partly inspired by the death of her younger brother, Ari Nesher, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver six years ago, has already won prizes around the world. This summer, it received the Viewpoints Award at the Tribeca Festival in New York and the Best Israeli Debut Film Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Earlier this week, it won four Ophir Awards, including the Best Picture Award (which means it will be Israel’s official selection to be considered for a Best International Feature Oscar), Best Director for Nesher, and Best Actress for Lia Elalouf – an extraordinary achievement for a first-time director.

Nesher, 27, spoke to me a week before the Ophirs, and she seemed in many ways like any first-time director, excited over the release of her movie. But the soft-spoken director, who projects both poise and vulnerability, left no doubt that she was mindful of the tragedy at the heart of her life and her movie, as well as the tragic events unfolding in Israel and the region since the start of the war in Gaza.

She began writing the screenplay for Come Closer not long after her brother’s death and worked on it for several years. At first, “It was like I could only see dark colors. And then I was able to see pink and blue and white again. It took me a long time, and I feel like the film has been this lifeline for me because it has funny moments, and it’s sexy and it has romantic parts… It’s a film that loves life – eventually. It took me some time to get there personally. And I feel like maybe if I hadn’t written the script, it would have taken me more time.”

The movie tells the story of Eden (Lia Elalouf), a reckless, troubled young Tel Aviv woman still very attached to her younger brother, Nati (Ido Tako), and her struggle to cope after his death in a car accident. She discovers that Nati had a sweet girlfriend from a more modest background, Maya (Darya Rosen), whom he kept secret from his family. The two young women are drawn together in a dangerously intense bond forged in grief, and Eden undergoes a complex journey as she finds a way to love again.

Before making the film, Nesher spent several years as a news editor and anchor for Channel 13 and also created documentary pieces. “Some people do a post-army trip to India, and I did a post-army trip to the news,” she said.

She also studied screenwriting at the Sam Spiegel School for Film and Television in Jerusalem and developed Come Closer in the Sam Spiegel Screenwriting Lab.

Nesher was almost finished editing the movie when the war broke out on October 7.

"Everyone in my generation knows someone who died on Oct. 7" - Nesher

“For my generation, 18-30, everyone knows someone who died this year. Everyone,” she said, noting that Darya Rosen’s best friend, Ayelet Arnin, a 22-year-old KAN news editor, was killed at the Supernova music festival.

“I do feel that people now see [the film] differently than they would have if there wasn’t a war… I feel that it’s a very sad but interesting year to put this out in the world. I’ve been getting a lot of responses from people who lost their brothers this year. They’ve written to me, saying they feel represented on the screen… That was really moving.”

The movie had its world premiere at Tribeca, and she has noticed differences in the way audiences in Israel and abroad have responded to the film.

“When we were in New York, people were laughing so hard at the funny scenes, and at the very end, they were crying. They weren’t expecting a film that is so sad and so they were laughing more [early on]. In Israel, people cry in such unexpected places, like at the party in the beginning before he dies, just because the context of youth this year is colored in this very dark color of what we’ve been through with young people dying after participating in a party.”

Working through her grief by making a movie was natural for Nesher, who is the daughter of Avi Nesher, Israel’s most acclaimed and beloved filmmaker. She grew up on his movie sets, appearing in cameos in his films since she was a baby. He was working in Hollywood then, and Tom Nesher remembers dancing to a Britney Spears song at the age of three with Jennifer Grey, who was starring in her father’s film, Ritual, in a talent contest on location in Jamaica.

Both of her parents are in the arts – her mother, Iris Nesher, is an artist and photographer – and they encouraged her interest in filmmaking. Even before she finished high school, she made an important contribution to her father’s career, introducing him to actress Joy Rieger, who appeared in one of her student films. Her father went on to cast Rieger in starring roles in three of his movies.

Nesher waited until very late in the writing process to show the script to her father, saying, “I wanted it to be in my own voice.” Her parents visited the set only once. “They were really curious, so I let them come. But my father is such a big deal in Israel that he couldn’t just stand there quietly and have people ignore him.”

She has worked hard to get people to accept her as a filmmaker in her own right. “For a long time, when people would write about me, it was ‘Avi Nesher’s daughter.’ Then it was ‘Avi Nesher’s daughter, Tom,’ and now it’s just ‘Tom Nesher,’ and that’s a process that was important for me to go through.”

Given the fact that the film revolves around the loss of a brother, she knew that many people would assume the entire film is autobiographical, but she said that isn’t the case: “The story in the script is not my life, it’s not things as they happened to me. It’s based on a real emotion, but it’s not the real story.”

Working with her young cast was a joyful process, she said, especially with her two lead actresses, neither of whom had been in a movie before. “I needed to find a tiger and a bunny, and they were the most interesting tiger and bunny that came along,” she said.

The movie was shot in 20 days, with one guerrilla-style day of illicit location shooting in Sinai, where part of the story takes place and where Israelis are not officially allowed to film. Nesher was involved in every aspect of the film, from the clothes, which came from her and the actresses’ closets, to the Israeli music on the soundtrack. “I wanted it to sound like the soundtrack of a generation, the soundtrack of this moment.”

She noted that Anthony Bregman, the film’s American producer, who has made such indie classics as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, brought her “this idea of ‘travel porn.’ He said, you don’t want to make it universal, like it could be anywhere, you want to feel the specifics.”

As she speaks, you get the sense that she has managed to channel her brother’s spirit into the film, and that this has brought her peace.

“It was important to me to make a film that Ari would have loved,” she explained. “We watched a lot of films together, and we didn’t like slow, depressing films. A film about loss could have been heavy and depressing, so it was important to me to make a movie that would be entertaining…

“It’s also interesting in the context of this year, and all the discussion about saving lives versus the strategy of waging the war. Come Closer shows how the loss of one life can influence the world. I don’t think it’s a depressing film. I think people come out of it with the feeling that you’re lucky to be alive.”