- Golden Globe Awards
Longing (Ga’agua) (Israel)
At first glance, middle-aged Ariel Bloch (Shai Avivi) is an established, successful single businessman living an ordinary, worry-free life. One day, after many years without contact, his college girlfriend Ronit (Assi Levy) invites him to lunch. She has something she finally needs to tell him: when they broke up 20 years ago, she was pregnant and gave birth to a boy, who recently died in a car accident. But that eye-opening news is only the first in a series of escalating revelations that will have unpredictable consequences for people Ariel has yet to meet and for his own evaluation of what is important to him in his life.Shocked to learn of the son he never knew he had, Ariel takes a day out of his busy Tel Aviv schedule to visit his grave. There he bonds with another grief-stricken parent, Gideon, who is coming daily to the cemetery to nurse his own personal guilt about his daughter’s suicide. Determined to find out more about his son, Ariel travels to Akko, a picturesque city by the sea in the north of the country, where he meets those who knew the boy, among them his teacher, Lilia, his 15-year-old girlfriend and the school principal. Each one reveals a new and different side of the boy he never knew.Writer-director Savi Gabizon creates a narrative that makes Ariel almost immediately a different man after Ronit’s revelations. His need to know about his son takes him into communities, families, and circumstances unknown to him and also unexpected. Like for the protagonist, the question the film ultimately delivers to audiences is what kind of father could Ariel have been? It remains unanswerable, but through his journey from solitude and individualism to sharing, Ariel overcomes his traumas and will at least learn something about himself and heal some wounds along the way.