Soda
Director/Co-Writer: Erez Tadmor
Israel | 2024 | Hebrew with English subtitles | 99 min
Welcome by Sara Hascal, Director of the Hebrew Language, Literature and Culture Program, Brandeis University
NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE
Lior Raz (Fauda) commands the screen as Shalom Gottlieb, a former WWII partisan leader and soda factory foreman in a small Israeli working-class neighborhood in the early 1950s. When Eva (Rotem Sela, Beauty and the Baker), a beautiful seamstress with a young daughter, joins the community of Holocaust survivors, whispers ignite a rumor of her possible past as a Nazi collaborator. As suspicions swirl, the tight-knit residents wrestle with their scars and secrets. Shalom’s desire to be with Eva betrays both his family and his fellow survivors. As tensions mount, he is torn between his passion for enigmatic Eva and his duty to uncover the truth about her past.
Nominated for 3 Israeli Academy Awards, this compelling and visually arresting drama set in the early years of the Israeli state and in the still vivid wake of the Holocaust was inspired by director Erez Tadmor’s grandfather, a resistance fighter in the forests of Poland and a leader in an Israeli neighborhood of Holocaust survivors. A postwar community still dominated by fear and terrible memories, haunted by illnesses and nightmares.
Erez Tadmor is a multi-award winning director and screenwriter from Tel Aviv, known for his distinctive storytelling in film and television, including A Matter of Size, Strangers, Magic Men, Children of Nobody, Matchmaking.
