Shake Your Cares Away (2020)

This film has to be explored on several levels. For one thing, it is a massive co-production with Israel, which brought together producers from Germany, Russia (including Natalya Mokritskaya and Mila Rozanova, as well as the Russian cinematographer Sergey Mokritskiy), and France. One of the film’s co-producers is Alejandro González Iñárritu, a five-time Oscar winner and five-time nominee for the same award. All of this happened for the Israeli director Tom Shoval, who himself wrote his second feature film Shake Your Cares Away. This is a drama about the universal human lack of understanding and unwillingness not even to show compassion to one’s neighbour, but to receive it. It stars Bérénice Bejo, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in the French film The Artist. In Shake Your Cares Away she plays the widow of a multi-millionaire. Left alone in her luxurious villa, she decides to shelter homeless people from the street — and since the story takes place in Israel, the people who seek refuge in her home are primarily repatriated Russian Jews. This subtle film blends in the wide view at the sorry state of the marginal groups with the social anti-utopia: soon enough we discover, that the intense people who believe no one perceives all help as mockery — and so the fragile world that is carefully constructed by the inconsolable rich woman is destined to be destroyed in the most miserable way. Finally, this is also a film about contemporary Israel, which turned into the last Babel on Earth where everyone encounters one another, the Arabs and the Jews, the rich and the poor.