Asia won three prizes at this festival: Best Actress for the film’s star, Shira Haas; Best Cinematography for Daniella Nowitz; and the Nora Ephron Award for Pribar – in 2020. But that year, the in-person festival was canceled due to the pandemic and only the judges who voted got to see it online. A version of the festival was put together this year featuring a selection of films from 2020, as well as new movies for 2021.
A great deal has changed during this year, both for the world and for Pribar and her film. When she first submitted the movie to Tribeca, she could not have guessed that this story of Asia (Alena Yiv), a single mother from Russia who works as a nurse and cares for her rebellious, terminally ill teen daughter, Vika (Haas), would go around the world to festivals while she had to stay home. Nor would she have expected that this quiet, intense and moving film would win nine Ophir Awards, the prizes of the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, including Best Picture. It is now showing in cities all over the US as well as in Israel.
“It was amazing to sit there at Tribeca, in the midst of people enjoying the movie,” Pribar said. “I realized it’s a universal story, that the people there could relate to it.”
The movie was seen by thousands throughout the past year, mainly online. “I think the movie works both ways, it’s an intimate experience if you watch it at home, but it’s a different experience on the big screen... It’s especially great to see Daniella Nowitz’s cinematography when you watch it in a theater.”
Although Pribar, a graduate of the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel School of Film and Television, looked at many actresses for the two lead roles, once she saw Yiv and Haas together, “I knew it had to be them. The click between them was so immediate.” In the script, “I had written that they look like sisters,” she said. Asia had her daughter as a teenager, so the two are quite close in age. “Lots of times you see actors playing parents and children and they have a similar hairstyle or something, but these two really look like each other. When I get a photo of them together and try to tag them, my phone doesn’t know who is who.”
The small age gap and the unusual circumstances “make the mother and daughter more equal as the film goes on. When the girl asks her mother for a cigarette, the mother can’t say no at that moment.”
While the two embody their roles so beautifully, Pribar emphasized that they are not playing themselves. “Alena is about as far as you can get from Asia [in real life],” she said. Yiv, who is far more confident than the character she plays, Pribar said, first made a splash on the Israeli entertainment scene in her role as Yulia, a prostitute, in the series Blue Natalie and won the Best Actress Ophir Award for Asia.
Another big change that took place during the past year or so was Haas’s rise to international stardom. She was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Emmy and won a Film Independent Spirit Award for her role in the Netflix series, Unorthodox, which was released shortly before Asia was shown at Tribeca in 2020. She continued to charm Shtisel fans when the third season of that series was released in late 2020. Haas was profiled by dozens of publications, including The New York Times and Vogue, and Chanel dressed her for awards ceremonies. In February, she even made Time magazine’s ”TIME100 Next” list, which features the rising stars of the year 2021 who will “shape the future of entertainment, health, politics and business.”
“It doesn’t surprise me that Shira is so successful. She is so talented and she works very hard,” said Pribar. “When we were in New York, every three minutes, someone would stop her on the street and say something like, ‘Thanks to you I survived the hardest period in my life because of Unorthodox’... Her ability to touch an audience and move them emotionally is extraordinary. She has the ability to express so much without even saying a word.”
Haas, who suffered from cancer as a child, was able to draw on her experiences to play Vika, “but the work is not just to bring herself to the story, but to understand who the character is,” the director said.
Pribar knew she was “incredibly” lucky to have these two actresses aboard on a very emotionally demanding project. While Asia is not autobiographical for Pribar — she is not from a Russian family — the emotions the story evokes are very personal for her.
“I knew I wanted to tell a story about a mother and daughter and an illness, and I wanted to tell a story that gives some hope,” she said. “It’s something that is very close to me.” She had a sister who passed away under different circumstances when Pribar was very young. “Looking back, I had thoughts on how the experience was different for me and for my mother.”
Pribar, who has two young children, ages three-and-a-half and one-and-a-half, became interested in “how a woman becomes a mother and what it does to her when her daughter is sick, how she goes through this with her daughter.”
The decision to make the family in the film Russian came about because “I wanted to make a movie about the intense contact between the mother and daughter, where they are pretty much alone together. In a conventional Israeli family, someone would always be showing up, an aunt or a grandmother. But with an immigrant family, it could be just the two of them.” She studied Russian to make the movie and worked with Yiv and a translator on the Russian dialogue in the film.
While it might sound as if the film takes place in claustrophobic settings — much of it is set in the hospital and their apartment — Pribar was able to open up the story and find beauty in it, both through close-ups of her lead actresses and by spotlighting lovely views of the Jerusalem hills that ring the Kiryat Yovel neighborhood of Jerusalem, where the characters live. “We had to feel that they look outside, that the sun comes into the apartment,” she said. “We had to find the small moments of grace in daily life, even when it is not easy.”