When you’ve made a short film that is close to perfect, it could be scary to expand it, but Mihal Brezis and Ohad Binnun, a married couple who met at Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel Film School and have been making films together for years, decided to take that risk, turning their Oscar-nominated short, Aya, into Dead Language, which opened in theaters around Israel on Thursday.
Their gamble paid off: Dead Language had its world premiere earlier this year at the Tribeca Festival, and then played at the Jerusalem Film Festival, receiving rapturous reviews in the US. It won the Anat Pirchi Award for Best Script at the Jerusalem Film Festival this summer, where it had its Israel premiere. It is nominated for 12 Ophir Awards, including Best Picture.
Aya told the story of a woman (Sarah Adler) who goes to the airport to pick up her husband and impulsively poses as the chauffeur for a Danish man (Ulrich Thomsen), a music professor, which leads to a strange afternoon of unexpected intimacy.
Dead Language also opens with the character of Aya picking up a Danish visitor, but the film moves on from there. Sarah Adler and Ulrich Thomsen reprise their roles, giving compelling, nuanced performances. Their relationship is more complex and developed in Dead Language, which also focuses on Aya’s marriage, her work life – she is an executive at a company that uses AI to sell cryptocurrency – and her quest to reignite the spark she felt when she impulsively picked up a stranger at the airport.
The well-received film co-stars Yehezkel Lazarov as Aya’s husband, and Gal Malka as her co-worker who is more confident in her social life. The cast also includes two European actors, in addition to Thomsen: Maciej Maciejewski from Poland and Lars Eidinger from Germany, as figures who pass briefly through her life.
Both films were written by Binnun and Brezis with Tom Shoval, their Sam Spiegel School classmate, and Amital Stern joined them to collaborate on the script for Dead Language. Although they open in a similar way, the two films are very different. Aya is realistic, while Dead Language gets progressively more absurd and even surrealistic – both are unpredictable, both in their plot lines and the emotions they evoke.
The journey from the first to the second film took them a decade, and in between, they made the English-language film The Etruscan Smile, which starred Brian Cox as an ornery Scottish man visiting his family in the US.
THE OBVIOUS question to ask a married couple who just made a movie about a troubled, distant married couple is how much of the film is their story, but having interviewed them several times over the years, I know that they are extremely close, both as co-directors and parents to two children, 13 and five. They are the first to admit that the path they have chosen is not an easy one.
“To be a couple who directs together brings an extra challenge beyond the filmmaking,” said Brezis. “When you work together, you’re totally immersed in the movie – neither of you can be home with the kids. The film itself becomes the most meaningful and demanding child of all.”
They called an au pair who took care of the children when they were filming Dead Language “our Mary Poppins.”
“You just don’t have any time for the kids during shooting, and it was better for them to stay at home,” said Brezis. The au pair was one of the one the most important crew member they cast – without her they could not have made the movie, they said.
Part of the film was shot in Tel Aviv, and the couple lived there while their children stayed home in Jerusalem. Later, they flew to Prague to shoot more of the movie, and Brezis recalled that the day they were shooting one of the most important scenes, their daughter was sick back home. “After 16 hours of shooting, we sang her a lullaby on WhatsApp video,” she said.
“For an hour, in the lobby of the hotel,” added Binnun. “The actors went to eat and they looked at us singing, it was a surrealistic scene: two exhausted directors singing lullabies into a phone.”
“Until she fell asleep,” Brezis said.
But it wasn’t only pregnancy and childcare that explains why it took a decade to turn Aya into a full-length film.
“It took us so long to make Dead Language because it wasn’t an easy story to pin down, with all its complexity and nuance,” said Brezis.
“I think the story followed us throughout our lives; it matured with us. When we were younger, the story was all about Aya’s character – her vibrant curiosity for strangers, and the sense of magic that can arise from chance encounters. But as you grow up as a filmmaker, the themes that absorb you also evolve, and in parallel to writing the film, we were building our life together as a couple.
“And the questions that arose, made their way into the film: how can you draw something from the magic that exists in chance encounters and infuse it in your long-term relationship? How do you keep the spark and mystery alive in a long relationship that cools off over time?”
Inspiration behind the film
Binnun said Dead Language was inspired, in part, by a quote by psychotherapist Esther Perel: “She said that in the Western world, people will usually have two or three meaningful long-term relationships over their lifetime. The question is – will it be with the same person?... She was referring to the fact that when love dies, and a relationship seems to be coming to an end, the question is whether you can reinvent yourself and your relationship – and that really spoke to us.”
Part of the point of Dead Language, Brezis said, “Is how people can become strangers to each other in a relationship, in contrast to the intimacy you can experience with someone you don’t really know… It can be quite perplexing to sense a deeper closeness in a fleeting encounter than with the person who shares your life for years.”
BINNUN SAID that a scene illustrating how much spouses believe they know about each other and how little they really do was called “the purse game.” The couple’s friends challenge Aya’s husband to name the items in her purse, only to pull out one very unexpected one (no spoilers here).
“When you’ve been with someone for years, it’s natural to assume you know them. But the scene shows how misguided that assumption can be – and how dangerous it can be to the relationship,” he said. “Once you believe that, there’s no mystery left, no vitality – and just no oxygen.”
This thought was the opening point for the second film, he said. “That’s why we called it Dead Language, because there’s the sense of the death of love.”
Brezis noted that, “Aya becomes more and more distant and alienated from her husband, to the point where he’s almost a stranger to her.” But in that process, they said, when pushed to the extreme, it may actually become an opportunity to rediscover each other.
When two people – either strangers or a long-married couple – truly connect, things may not go as expected, they said. When walls between people break down, said Brezis, “You open yourself up to being hurt, too. It’s like, that’s part of the deal. When you want to make a connection, you take a risk… In the movie, people get hurt, but they gain something at the same time.”
While they considered using different actors for the second film, after going through an extended casting process and auditioning other actresses, “We realized no one could step into her shoes,” Brezis said, and cast Adler a second time, as well as Thomsen. “It was clear that she needs to be Aya again,” said Binnun, adding that the decade between films only made her character more interesting.
Speaking of being interesting, the last third of Dead Language features some twists that will leave viewers puzzling over their meaning, and which audiences discuss long after they leave the theater.
“We tried to achieve a sense of ‘heightened reality,’” said Brezis. “The film is about how we seek meaning in our lives beyond the flatness of daily routine. Some people find it in religion, others in sexual adventures... Aya attempts to find it in the liminal spaces of human connection.”