What’s on TV this week?

Remembrance Day memories, Independence Day exuberance.

By HANNAH BROWN
Zero Motivation (photo credit: PR)
Zero Motivation
(photo credit: PR)
Channel 1 will air several films to commemorate Remembrance Day. Until the End, which will air on May 10 at 3:30 p.m. and May 11 at 5:30 p.m., is a celebration of the life of a fallen soldier, Omri Koren, by a friend who takes Koren’s beloved VW Beetle on a journey.
Who By Fire, Who By Sword is a look at three soldiers who lost their lives recently in very different circumstances. It will be shown at May 10 at 9 p.m.
Parallel Lines, which will be shown at 4:30 p.m. on May 11, is a documentary about Orit, a war widow who has remarried and started a new family but still has a hard time letting go of the memory of her late husband.
YES VOD is celebrating Independence Day with some recent hit movies, as well as Israeli classics.
Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation, a humorous look at some very alienated female soldiers, was a huge hit around the world. It won the top international feature film award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2014 and was the most profitable movie of the year in Israel, the first time in many years that a locally produced film has been more popular than Hollywood fare. It stars Dana Ivgy, who won the Ophir Award for Best Actress for her performance (and won the Ophir for Best Supporting Actress for Close to Her, the same year); and Nelly Tagar, who is starring in the YES Comedy Channel series My Successful Sisters and Avi Nesher’s upcoming movie, Past Life.
Other highlights of YES’s Independence Day programming include last year’s hit film The Kind Words by Shemi Zarhin, about adult siblings who learn some family secrets after their mother’s death; Ephraim Kishon’s The Policeman; and two Avi Nesher movies, the 1978 The Troupe (Ha Lahakah) about an army entertainment troupe, and Turn Left at the End of the World, a coming-of-age story about two teens in a Negev town in the 1960s.
Dope, a comedy that won an editing award and received a lot of buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, will be shown on YES 3 on May 17 at 10 p.m. and on May 21 at 8:15 on HOT Fun HD. Directed by Rick Famuyiwa, the film was the subject of a huge bidding war at the festival. It’s about a group of geeky African-American teenagers in a tough part of Los Angeles who are obsessed with 1990s hip hop. They unwittingly get involved with a drug deal that is much more than they can handle.
For fans of The Good Wife, the series is just about over. The show’s final episode airs in the US on May 8, and in Israel on YES Drama on May 9. While it’s always good for a series to end on a high note, I wish this show could go on for another few seasons, and I know I’m not alone in this. There are so many wonderful characters, with new ones introduced every season, that it constantly renews itself, unlike so many shows. But the series creators, Robert and Michelle King, decided it was time to move on, and that was that.
The penultimate episode ended with a cliff hanger: Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), now the Illinois governor, is on trial for corruption, and the jury comes in with a verdict before he can decide whether to take a plea deal. Details of the show’s finale are a closely guarded secret.
Asked about it, star Julianna Margulies described the ending as “Satisfying, uplifting and sad.”
Starting on May 19 at 8:20 p.m., Season 3 of the sci-fi smash series Orphan Black will run from Sunday to Thursday on HOT Plus and HOT Xtra VOD. You should have enough time to refresh your memory on the twisty plot, which is virtually impossible to describe without revealing a key spoiler.
Tatiana Maslany is extraordinary in the multiple roles she plays.
The fourth season is already airing in the US.