A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015) on Netflix
PG-1320151h 35mBiographyDramaHistory
In British Mandate Jerusalem, Amos is the only child of Ashkenazi immigrants and stays closest to his mother, Fania. She fills his childhood with stories from her past that end badly.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.0/104,612 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes72%
Trailer
Plot summary
Amos's parents are Ashkenazi Jews who left Europe for Jerusalem, where his mother, Fania, finds life hard: to her the city is a desert, and her family is far off in Tel Aviv. Amos is their only child and devoted to her, and the tales she tells him of her own childhood often end unhappily. Friends of the family, a childless couple, regularly take him with them; on one visit to a Palestinian Arab acquaintance, he injures the man's small son while playing on a swing. In November 1947, neighbors gather around a radio to hear the United Nations vote to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, and his father Arieh, overjoyed, tells him a Jewish state will end the anti-Semitism his family knew in Europe.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film's $4.2 million budget was partly funded by the right-leaning Israeli government, which wanted to promote Israel as a filming location and counter pro-Palestinian boycott efforts; Natalie Portman said the film was "absolutely not" pro-Israeli or patriotic and that she was "very much against" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
- Natalie Portman optioned the rights to Amos Oz's memoir over tea while visiting him and his wife, and it took her eight years to write the script and find funding, during which she insisted the adaptation remain in Hebrew.
- Natalie Portman, playing Amos Oz's mother, an immigrant from what is now Ukraine, made considerable efforts to remove all traces of an American accent from her Hebrew; it was the second film in which she spoke Hebrew.
