Two sisters try to be absolved for the sins of their father in Avi Nesher’s compelling Past Life. Set in late 70s Israel the plot centers on Nana (Nelly Tagar) and Sephi (Joy Rieger) two close siblings who discover their father (Doron Tavory) might have committed gruesome acts during the war after a stranger confronts them. This sends them reeling into a painful journey to a past they might have been better off not knowing about. Nesher’s film intelligently captures the way in which the actions of those who came before us will always shape our own destiny. We spoke to the director about the themes in the film and why he was compelled to tell this story.

The film is based on a true story, what made you want to turn these events into a film?

I made a film a few years ago called The Matchmaker which was also Holocaust themed, the film was very successful in Israel and festivals, so after this movie I got a lot of offers on Holocaust movies. I met a great composer called Ella Milch-Sheriff and she sent me her father’s diaries, I thanked her but passed on the opportunity, she insisted I met her and I explained to her why I couldn’t do it. She started crying, it was very embarrassing, so I asked her why this was so important to her, my mother is a Holocaust survivor and I wouldn’t make a movie about her. So she told me about her sister and her, and that was an extraordinary story, it was about how we deal with trauma, about how little we know about our parents. I told her if she could tell me the story without beautifying it I would make the movie, and she did.

Both sisters in the film are artists, do you think there is a different way in which artists deal with trauma?

The fact they were both artists made it easier for me to understand their drives, in many ways I think art is the best way to deal with trauma. If you think about the American experience, slavery for example, people dealt with the trauma of that in great movies like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night. I find it very interesting both characters are artists because we see them exorcise their demons through art.

I really liked the bookends, the film starts and ends with concerts and it’s almost as if nothing might’ve happened in between, and yet their lives have changed completely.

I’m very happy that you noticed them, we start at one point, they go through this extraordinary odyssey and then they go back to the same place but with music about their parents’ experience which helped them deal with their problems.

Is there any art that you’re attached to at this moment that you wonder how others will perceive in the future?

I grew up cinematically during the 70s when I was in university and the cinema of the 70s really addresses what was going on in society, MASH dealt with the Vietnam war in a unique way, the 70s were a time when people made movies that tried to have a dialogue between the past and the present. Cinema is such an incredible mechanism to deal with the past, like Faulkner said “the past isn’t dead, the past isn’t even past”. I think we need to remove the shackles of the past consciously and there aren’t many cinematic projects that perform this political/social service. Within the great American cinematic tradition people like Capra used cinema as a powerful weapon, and I find it incredible that not many people use it like that.

Making a movie takes a long time, is it sometimes frustrating that movies will never be able to address current events in an immediate way?

Not really because cinema is not suitable to address things drastically, cinema is related to the soul of a nation, to its memory, culture and soul. Cinema can’t deal with something that happened yesterday, it would be foolish to make a movie about Trump. Cinema really deals with the psyche of society, it took Coppola a long time to put together Apocalypse Now, for me great cinema isn’t time specific. In the Middle East we have our own trauma and even if it takes me a long time to make a movie about our trauma, by the time the movie is done the Jewish people will still be around.

Past Life is in theaters today. For more information click here.