The short film Requiem for a Fish (33 minutes) is available at the top of the page.
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Gadi Rimer’s documentary Requiem for a Fish (2021) retraces the story of a fourteen-minute short of the same title. The original was made in 1968 by the director’s grandfather, Yosef Rimer, known in the local film industry as Joe. It was the first Israeli film to put a camera underwater.
As the film opens, Gadi finds a tin box in his parents’ home, filled with strips of underwater footage his grandfather shot. Around the same time, the Israel Film Archive in Jerusalem informs him that they have found the reels of the only film his grandfather ever made. Gadi had believed the film was lost forever; now the archive begins restoring it.
Just as the faded film stock regains its color in restoration, Gadi’s film carries out a restoration of its own, a narrative one. He opens the family archive and returns to the story of how the original film was made. The first testimonies come from his family: his father, Udi, his uncle Roni, and his grandmother Hannah, who all played central parts in the production. He then reaches the senior professionals who worked on it, among them the editor Jacques Ehrlich, the composer Ilan Mochiach, and the harmonica player Dror Adler. Joe died in 1991, and he appears only through the memories of others and through his personal archive, the footage and objects he left behind. The film does not just tell the story of a forgotten film; it also brings back to life a family memory that over the years became myth.
A similar narrative pattern runs through several recent Israeli documentaries, among them Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat (2011), Muli Landsman’s Saga of a Photo (2013), Michal Weits’s Blue Box (2021), Shir Newman’s How to Say Silence (2021), and Rotem Dimand’s The Woman Who Didn’t Know How to Love (2026). In these films too, the filmmakers uncover and investigate a family story, set in motion by personal objects found in an archive their grandparents left behind. The discovery of these items is what leads the filmmakers to make their films. More than once, the archival discovery sparks a confrontation between the generations, and in some cases it also holds a secret.
Although Requiem for a Fish does not expose buried secrets or stir tensions between the generations, it too reveals a formative family legacy, a story that might have been forgotten had its creator not set out to illuminate it once more. Through the story, Gadi tries to understand the different inclinations and patterns of behavior that passed from one generation to the next, above all the drive to make films. Joe was a lighting technician on legendary Israeli productions from the 1950s onward. His son, Udi, followed him into the profession and worked on many films, and his grandson, Gadi, is today a director.
The narration accompanies the film throughout and often turns poetic, with lines like “I notice that the image of the grass in the field looks like waves at sea. Wind in films is not only wind.” Twice, Gadi repeats the statement that in his family, cinema is a “hereditary disease.” In his documentary he confronts that “disease” directly by bringing his grandfather’s film to light. Joe’s passion for the work, it seems, was contagious, and drew those around him to cooperate even under difficult conditions.
Requiem for a Fish is built around two central themes: cinema and the sea. Joe loved the sea with all his heart, and the film reveals that this love passed to his sons and grandsons as well. Joe was also a man of considerable technical and mechanical skill. His talent for building and fixing things earned him the nickname “golden hands,” and he used those hands to construct innovative devices designed for filming underwater. In this way he brought together his two great loves, cinema and the sea, to create his pioneering film Requiem for a Fish.
The plot of the original film is very simple, reminiscent of a fairy tale. One viewing makes clear that the main goal in making it was to break new ground in underwater cinematography, which also takes up most of the film. The film opens with a small boy who goes out to sea with his fisherman father and wants to adopt a clownfish caught in the net. The father refuses and throws the fish back into the sea. The boy decides to return alone to the sea and dive into the depths to find it. From here, the film devotes ample time to spectacular images of the underwater world, its fish and its varied coral reefs, and returns to the story of the boy only near the end.
The original film also raises an interesting question: what remains of its cinematic legacy beyond the family? Joe’s film is deeply influenced by the work of Jacques Cousteau, the French marine explorer and documentary filmmaker. It has no dialogue, only the boy’s voice-over, and it uses its original music expressively.
The film was the first in Israel to feature underwater footage, but it is hard to say it inspired many successors. The sea is one of the defining elements of the Israeli landscape, and it is well represented in Israeli cinema too. Yet little of what happens onscreen takes place beneath the surface; most scenes keep to the beach or stay above the water. Joe’s film remains an anomaly in Israeli cinema even today.
Requiem for a Fish is an important documentary. It presents not only a forgotten family memory but also a forgotten film from the history of Israeli cinema, one made possible by the passion and daring of a man with a rare gift for invention. The film is distinguished by restrained editing, a finely crafted script, polished narration, beautiful cinematography, and a moving score drawn from the original film. All of these serve the personal story, which begins in the family home and ends on a beach in Eilat, in a meeting with the hero of Joe’s film. Together they prompt reflection on how family legacy and cinematic legacy join and pass from one generation to the next. The finest expression of this is the film itself, which draws up from the depths of the archive the story of an old film that nearly vanished.
