{"id":1793,"date":"2020-09-13T19:53:21","date_gmt":"2020-09-13T19:53:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ilanmoskovitch.com\/?page_id=1793"},"modified":"2020-11-06T13:44:02","modified_gmt":"2020-11-06T13:44:02","slug":"apollonian-story","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/ilanmoskovitch.com\/?page_id=1793","title":{"rendered":"Apollonian Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Apollonian Story<\/h1>\n
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Documentary <\/strong>\/ 66 Min \/ 2013 \/ Israel \/ Hebrew<\/p>\n

Forty years ago, while searching for his place in the world, Nissim Kahlon (67) made his home in a limestone cliff under the Apollonia National Park, north of the Herzliya coast. Amidst the sound of the waves and the fragile limestone mountain, he dug a cave to live in, to shield him from the heat and cold. For years he lived without electricity or running water. Today the \u201chome\u201d that he built out of anything and everything \u2013 rocks, trash, sand \u2013 contains countless caves and tunnels, and Nissim insists on continuing to work on it every day. His work never ends. The sea, which he loves dearly, constantly gnaws at his house, threatening his life\u2019s work. The unending building also takes a toll \u2013 his body aches and betrays him.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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After years of estrangement, Nissim suggests that his son, Moshe (18), who was born in the cave and will soon join the military, move in with him and inherit the cave. Together they work to dig out the cave in which he will live in. Through their hard work, a complex relationship between father and son is revealed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Festivals and Awards:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Jerusalem International Film Festival, 2013;\u00a0 Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival, 2013;\u00a0Thessaloniki<\/span>\u00a0Documentary Festival, Greece, 2013;\u00a0<\/span>Full Frame Documentary Festival, 2014;\u00a0AFI \/ Silver Doc<\/span>\u00a0Documentary Festival, USA, 2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Director<\/strong>: Ilan Moskovich, Dan Bronfeld<\/p>\n

Producer<\/strong>: Ilan Moskovitch, Dan Bronfeld<\/p>\n

Production Company<\/strong>: Tree M Productions<\/p>\n

Cinematographer<\/strong>: Dan Bronfeld<\/p>\n

Editor<\/strong>: Tanya Shwartz<\/p>\n

Soundtrack Editor<\/strong>: Gadi Raz<\/p>\n

Supporter(s)<\/strong>: The New Fund for Cinema and Television, Noga Communications \u2013 Channel 8<\/p>\n

Subtitles<\/strong>: English<\/p>\n

Film Name in Hebrew<\/strong>:\u00a0\u05e1\u05d9\u05e4\u05d5\u05e8 \u05d0\u05e4\u05d5\u05dc\u05d5\u05e0\u05d9<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>

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Full Frame: Apollonian Story Review<\/h1>\n

Apollonian Story (2014)<\/h3>\n

Director:\u00a0Ilan Moscovitch,\u00a0Dan Bronfeld
\nCountry:\u00a0Israel
\nGenre:\u00a0Documentary\u00a0|\u00a0Biography\u00a0|\u00a0Family<\/p>\n

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Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong> The following review is part of our coverage of the 2014 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cFuck you\u201d make for fitting first words in a film as fundamentally angry\u2014in subject, if not sensibility\u2014as\u00a0Apollonian Story<\/i>. They\u2019re directed at the rock hewn by sexagenarian Nissim Kahlon, who continues to carve the house he first cut in the cliffs along Israel\u2019s northern coastline decades prior. It\u2019s the kind of film to benefit from a blurb read in advance; the unwitting observer\u2019s eyes will be slowly drawn to the ornate detail of every inch, the beautiful mosaics on which the movie never deigns to linger. That\u2019s primarily, perhaps, because it\u2019s more concerned with Nissim\u2019s residence as a home than a house; if it\u2019s a unique architecture that drew directors Ilan Moscovitch and Dan Bronfeld to make this film, it\u2019s the human structure they found within it that kept them there.<\/p>\n

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Great documentary direction, after all, is as much the realm of journalism as filmmaking, and what Moscovitch and Bronfeld have done here is sniffed out a great story and served it selflessly.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s only the parameters of the Full Frame Festival that rigorously reveal the film as reality; the shot-per-scene setup so serves the arresting, incidental drama of the piece it might be easy to mistakenly ascribe otherwise as a masterstroke of script-serving style. Great documentary direction, after all, is as much the realm of journalism as filmmaking, and what Moscovitch and Bronfeld have done here is sniffed out a great story and served it selflessly. That their subject is so willing only helps; addressing the camera once\u2014to insist a crew member stand for the Memorial Day siren before confessing \u201cI can\u2019t hear it\u201d\u2014Nissim is set enough in his ways to see no issue with being shot berating his eighteen year-old son Moshe throughout.<\/p>\n

Their arguments are as funny as they are ferocious, comic and cutting in equal measure. We can\u2019t but laugh when Nissim roves around yelling for Moshe in the foreground as the young man\u2019s head appears from beneath a pile of blankets in the distance. \u201cYou don\u2019t have a reason for being!\u201d Nissim screams as Moshe laughs it off in response, yet in the deft cut the directors make to the son chipping deeper into the cavernous abode we see manifested the muted anger of this dynamic; this house, this\u00a0home<\/i>, is literally forged on buried furies.\u00a0Apollonian Story<\/i>\u2019s great joy is the universal applicability of its ironies; there\u2019s a lovely, laugh-out-loud moment where Moshe hires a worker who\u2019s horrified to see these men cutting deeper into the cliff: \u201cWhy would you live here!?\u201d he practically weeps.<\/p>\n

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What might in weaker hands have been a tour of an incredible abode becomes in Moscovitch and Bronfeld\u2019s a study of the most average, a terrific take on the frailty of family and the hate we hold for those we love.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Why indeed? What might in weaker hands have been a tour of an incredible abode becomes in Moscovitch and Bronfeld\u2019s a study of the most average, a terrific take on the frailty of family and the hate we hold for those we love. \u201cI do it because I want to and not because I have to,\u201d Moshe muses in a huff after being sent to fetch his father something; where love is concerned this film doesn\u2019t entirely agree. His half-brother arrives in the film\u2019s final third, the strained silences between he and his father giving us pause to consider the primary dynamic again in retrospect. Nissim, we can only suspect, does the same; the complexity of these caverns are nought when compared to the labyrinthine longueurs between those who inhabit them.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a gorgeous pair of tracking shots close to the climax that follow Nissim as he treks through the corridors, revealing whole new areas that suggest we\u2019ve barely scratched the surface of this structure. So it is with the central relationship too; from the deadpan humour of a tallitt-clad Nissim haranguing a hoody-wearing Moshe to the heart-rending moment where the father, in a rare moment of uncovered compassion, sneaks a kiss from his slumbering son,\u00a0Apollonian Story<\/i>\u00a0is a remarkable real-life relationship drama as affecting as any fiction. Taking their cameras to an extraordinary house, Moscovitch and Bronfeld have made a film about an ordinary home. It\u2019s only slightly for the detail that they make us tempted to live there.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>