Israeli coming-of-age story ‘Sweet Mud’ heads to Netflix

Sweet Mud, Dror Shaul’s intense, moving, and sometimes disturbing coming-of-age drama about a boy with a mentally ill mother on a kibbutz, is now available on Netflix, with English subtitles. It’s been 18 years since it was released, and it holds up beautifully.

Shaul grew up on Kibbutz Kissufim near the Gaza border in the 1970s and drew on his memories to make the movie, specifically his experience of having a mentally ill parent and growing up without a father.

The story’s primary focus is 12-year-old Dvir (Tomer Steinhof) and his mother, Miri (Ronit Yudkevitch), who loves him but struggles to function, and who is considered an annoyance by most of the kibbutz members. It shows both the highs and lows of life on an old-fashioned kibbutz where the children were raised separately from their parents, and much of it is very dark.

The movie features a gallery of quirky and sometimes bizarre kibbutznik characters, played by some of Israel’s finest actors, among them Gal Zaid, Shai Avivi, Hila Ofer, Rivka Neumann, and Pini Tavger. Although it’s a mournful story, Sweet Mud is sometimes funny, and the comic highlight is a sex education lecture delivered by an emotionally repressed, humorless young teacher.

Shaul is a very interesting director, whose first movie was Operation Grandma, a black comedy also set on a kibbutz. In 2015, he made Atomic Falafel, an offbeat comedy about an Israeli teenage girl who befriends an Iranian girl online, and how they team up to save their countries from nuclear war. I’ll let you know if Netflix starts showing either of these.

Documentaries on KAN

It’s still possible to watch Gilad Tocatly’s series, The Day That Never Ends, on KAN 11 (kan.org.il), which presents a five-episode epic canvas of the events of October 7. Each episode presents a different time period on that day, starting from 6 to 7:15 a.m., with each part moving forward throughout the day. The series features interviews with 114 people from 23 different locations around the country, as well as soldiers from seven bases.

Among the interviewees are several familiar faces from previous news reports, such as Yagil Yaakov, a 13-year-old released hostage who has been active talking about his ordeal on social media, while many others have never been interviewed before.

The series features particularly hair-raising descriptions of how army bases were overrun in just minutes, as well as interviews from very small kibbutzim rarely mentioned in the media, such as Sufa and Ein Hashlosha.

This wide-ranging and comprehensive documentary reaffirms the fact that those who survived did so by a combination of luck and resourcefulness, as they waited many hours for help to arrive, which often came too late.

Also on KAN’s website, you can see Sorry for Asking, the program where viewers send in blunt, sometimes embarrassing questions to guests about a relevant topic. In a recent episode, the guests are survivors of the Nova music festival, and the questions provoke emotional reactions.

People ask just about everything you would want to know, including what decisions they made that turned out to be the most fateful, how they cope with feelings of survivor guilt (some have them strongly, others don’t), and how they have managed to resume their normal lives (not surprisingly, most are traumatized to the point where they have trouble functioning), and another question you might have wondered about, what drugs they took that morning. There is also an episode featuring evacuees.

The documentary Rachel from Ofakim, a look at one of the most famous faces of October 7, Rachel Edri, who survived 17 hours as a hostage, is also still available on KAN 11. It mixes interviews with Rachel, the Moroccan grandmother who makes great cookies and who will remind many of us of our neighbors, with reenactments of her and her husband’s ordeal by actors.

A sad coda to her story is that her husband, David, passed away just four months after the attack, partly because, Rachel believes, he couldn’t express his feelings of trauma as openly as she could. She is grateful that he shielded her from harm with his own body at a particularly scary moment during their ordeal. “What a husband,” she says.

IF YOU WANT some escapism, there’s nothing like a jewel thief. Jewel thieves have always been appealing characters, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, where Cary Grant is a charming gentleman thief who preys on wealthy hotel guests, including Grace Kelly, on the French Riviera (available on Apple TV+).

Stealing jewels doesn’t seem as bad as other kinds of theft because you must be so rich to own these items, it can play out more like a Robin Hood story.

Now there is a new series, Joan, based on the real-life UK jewel thief Joan Hannington, which is being shown on Hot 3 on Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m., starting on October 16, and is already available on Hot VOD and Next TV, as well as on YesVOD and Binge.

The lead character is played by Sophie Turner, best known as Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones, who makes Joan’s impulsive nature and lack of morals appealing. Turner looks so elegant in the role, especially when Joan gets a becoming new hairdo, that it made me wonder why she never got cast in one of the dramas about Princess Diana.The story moves along briskly, anchored by Turner’s performance as the resourceful heroine. There is a nice period soundtrack and some scenic locations around Europe.

MOVIES WHERE the homes and apartments are so jaw-droppingly beautiful that they are a central part of the movie’s appeal are called real-estate porn. The new Netflix movie Lonely Planet could be described as writers’-retreat real-estate porn.

It stars Laura Dern as Katherine, a famous novelist who goes to a writers’ retreat in the mountains of rural Morocco. It’s a fantastic-looking place, filled with colorful tiles, arched entryways, and a lovely pool. (This isn’t the first writers’-retreat real-estate porn, though; I believe that distinction belongs to Celine Song’s Past Lives.) There are also scenes in the local village that could be described as travel porn. Morocco is mostly shown as a kind of tame, tourist-friendly paradise, and there are even some beach scenes.

There’s also a plot, but for some it will be beside the point. Katherine is trying to finish her latest novel, while dealing with a breakup with her long-term partner. On the retreat, she meets Lily (Diana Silvers), a young novelist whose first book, which Lily humble-brags is just a “glorified beach read,” has suddenly become a bestseller. The male writers all flirt with the gorgeous Lily, who ignores her sensitive but not literary boyfriend, Owen (Liam Hemsworth), who works in finance. Katherine and Owen find themselves thrown together on a day trip and sparks fly. It’s not difficult to guess where it goes from there.

One nice aspect of the movie, which was written and directed by Susannah Grant, who wrote Erin Brockovich, is that she seems to be familiar with the cliques and jealousies of the literary world. There is a Nobel-Prize winning, monstre-sacre older novelist who is openly contemptuous of Owen, played by Iraqi-born Israeli actress Shosha Goren, who seems very much as if she is based on a real person. There are many scenes that show Dern typing away on her laptop and grimacing, then cutting out chunks she has just written. In another era, she would have been shown putting a page into a typewriter, typing furiously, then snatching the paper, crumpling it up, and throwing it into a wastepaper basket. 

Dern, who starred in such iconic David Lynch movies as Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, as well as Jurassic Park, is always fun to watch, and she has been having a career renaissance after winning an Oscar for her performance in Marriage Story in 2020. Liam Hemsworth is Chris’s younger brother; Liam is the one who was in The Hunger Games, and he has the same laid-back charm of his sibling.