Cinema
Late Summer Blues
בלוז לחופש הגדול
Renen Schorr · 1987
Synopsis
Tel Aviv, summer 1970, during the War of Attrition. Seven boys and girls have just passed their baccalaureate and are waiting to be called up: a last summer that forces them to choose what they want to be. The film follows four of them, each in a chapter: Yossi Zvillich, a naive and well-liked boy, the first in the class to leave; Aharleh, a pacifist who hesitates to dodge service and covers the walls with anti-war slogans; Mossi, a gifted musician whose profile marks him out for combat although he dreams of a military band; Margo, a diabetic whom the army will not take, who films them on super 8.
Context
Schorr had drawn the story from what he had lived through with his own class, the one that wrote the letter of the final-year schoolchildren to Golda Meir in 1970. Doron Nesher joined him for the screenplay; the funding committees rejected their successive versions until 1985, and the Ministry of Industry judged the film unpatriotic. Shot in winter in Tel Aviv on a small budget with mostly unknown actors, it was in 1987 the first Israeli film to open the Jerusalem festival, and was restored and re-released in cinemas in 2016.
Who it is for
One hour forty, in Hebrew. It helps to know that in 1970 Israel and Egypt were still fighting along the Suez Canal.
Prizes and reception
Silver Menorah prizes for best film, screenplay and music; around two hundred and eighty thousand viewers in three months; it has become a classic.