Moshe Rosenthal’s reputation has preceded him in the Israeli film industry in recent years. His new feature, Tell Me Everything (2026), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was selected to open the Jerusalem Film Festival this July; his feature debut, Karaoke (2022), earned wide acclaim and four Ophir Awards.
Karaoke was a brilliant debut. It centers on Meir (Sasson Gabay) and Tova (Rita Shukrun), an aging couple from the Tel Aviv suburb of Holon whose lives are upended by the arrival of a flamboyant new neighbor in their building. The film can fairly be called a comedy, but it is laced with a somber sense of missed chances, and is all the more touching for it. Audiences and critics were swept away.
Six years before Karaoke‘s success, Rosenthal directed the short Shabbaton (Leave of Absence, 2016), which in many ways anticipates the aesthetic and thematic sensibilities of his first feature. Shabbaton is a nearly perfect short film, compressing into a quarter of an hour a singular, peculiar story, as funny as it is sad, about masculinity, coming of age, and the tension between reality and fantasy, between center and periphery. The story turns on a chance encounter between a middle-aged high school teacher and his former students, who talk him into joining them for an illicit late-night adventure at the public pool. Their night together brings repressed feelings to the surface, about his masculinity, aging, and the passing of time.
From its opening shot, Shabbaton is unmistakably a film that makes bold, expressive use of cinematic language. Dreamlike synthesizer music, seemingly beamed in from the 1980s, fills the apartment. The camera dollies in on Meir, the film’s protagonist, seated on the balcony, his hair wrapped in aluminum foil, looking slightly alien. His back is to the camera, and to his home and family; his face is turned to the night sky. Mise-en-scène, music, and cinematography together convey Meir’s estrangement from his own life: he is home in body only, his thoughts and desires already drifting outward, toward the unknown. It takes a single moment, and not a word of dialogue, for the film to trace the inner crisis that will send him fleeing into the deserted suburban streets to rediscover, if only for one evening, a youthful spirit he had long forgotten he possessed.
Meir’s hair dye is itself a symbolic act, meant to make him look younger and blur the signs of aging. When it fails, leaving his hair orange, he puts on a hat and goes to the store to buy a product that will undo the embarrassing mistake. Mocked by his family, he feels more than ever the odd man out in his own home. This is only one example among many of how Rosenthal tells his story on two planes at once, one external and dramatic, the other symbolic. Meir, a teacher on sabbatical, confronts existential feelings he has evidently repressed for years, above all around aging and masculinity; the dyed hair symbolizes his hopeless attempt, as pathetic as it is heartbreaking, to hold back time.
Uri Klauzner plays Meir with precision, earning the character both sympathy and affection. In more ways than one, the role echoes Sasson Gabay’s in Karaoke: another Meir, wrestling with similar crises.
The film’s most striking setting is the public pool, where Meir’s former students are filming a video to mark a classmate’s army enlistment. The entire hall is drenched in electric blue, giving the film’s second half an even stranger atmosphere, dreamlike, almost surreal. Formal cinematic techniques, such as slow motion and underwater cinematography, heighten the hallucinatory quality of the occasion, in which the orange-haired teacher finds himself smoking weed with his former students and swimming with them in the middle of the night. In another symbolic choice, one that recalls the film’s preoccupation with masculinity, the part Meir is assigned in the students’ video is to play the flute. And though a flute is sometimes just a flute, there is no mistaking the phallic symbol here. It is hard not to fall in love with Shabbaton. The film is smart and deep, but also great fun, without taking itself too seriously. With cinematic language that is emphatic yet refined, it tells its story on the symbolic and dramatic levels alike, and carries its viewers through a complete experience in just a quarter of an hour.
