Synopsis
A director is hired to make a film about the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel. During the shooting, he realizes that two other anniversaries are taking place at the same time: his own and the Nakba, the "catastrophe" for the Palestinians. At the same time, he recounts the problems caused by a piece of land he bought several years ago. The director is Avi Mograbi himself and it is not always easy to know if he is playing a role or if everything that happens to him is real.
A word from Tënk
Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi was made just after How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon. With his first film, Mograbi engaged in a wild and shrewd comedic exercise, somewhere between a false intimate confession and a real encounter with Ariel Sharon. With Happy Birthday, Mr Mograbi, he pushes his game of false pretenses even further, enmeshing up to three simultaneous narratives that create a rich entanglement. Challenging the documentary-fiction dichotomy throughout his œuvre, his films don’t require us to perceive these categories as quite so dualistic. This game allows him to affirm himself in the character of a director who is totally overwhelmed by the difficulties that the complex reality of living in his country poses. Everything overwhelms in Mograbi's work, in fact, and it is this comedy of catastrophe and despair that he tries to communicate in this film.
Jacques Deschamps
Filmmaker
