chentasker It's not your everyday hero VS villain type of film, it's different, and it's probably not for everyone. It's hard to watch, both because of the delicate nature of the subject it's about and because most of the characters are hard to fall for, but once you manage to ignore it, you're in for a treat.It touches some of the ugliest parts of one of the ugliest topics in our lives, that is getting old, and manage to do it with creativity and lightheartedness that I didn't expect. It made me sad and happy, all at the same time, and if you're into this sort of films, you won't regret watching it.The directing was awesome, the cameraman as well. Also great performances by Aliza Rozen and Ze'ev Revach. Sorry for English mistakes.

robert-armon In the past two decades the Israeli cinema improved significantly and some excellent movies were produced. The present movies can be rated at the highest end! The cast is excellent (most are theater actors)and the atmosphere is real (I know it closely). I was surprised by the dialogue, acting and human dilemmas raised by this excellent movie. Going through with my late parents, I lived it again before my own turn! It has an excellent sense of humor and above all it reveals humanistic and philosophical aspects. I would give it a 10 but the pace is a little bit slow (what should we expect with these elderly people?!),otherwise it is a masterpiece about getting very old, two fingers up!!!

maurice yacowar The Farewell Party was probably the funniest film at this year's Palm Springs film festival. It had to be. It's about euthanasia. By making it equal parts farewell and party the comedy made the sombre reality bearable.In an Israeli retirement home a modest inventor Yeheskel devises a machine to add a mortal combination to a hopeless patient's IV. The delicate operation is done by a heavy combination of gears and chains that looks like it would raise a drawbridge. That's a comic paradox akin to "mercy killing." He makes it for his old friend Max, who begs for release. The only doctor who will help is a vet, another resident.Yeheskel and his accomplices do not take their enterprise lightly. At every step it's a battle of conscience, to determine whether they're taking a life or saving it. It's a fight between the law and justice. When the home's administrator scolds them for an indecorous generosity, her piercing, personalized insults make their justice superior to her law. They're also supported by an incidental news report, which features the daily traffic mortality count — an unsolved problem larger than mercy killing — and the story of an 80-year-old man who with no other alternative killed his suffering wife then himself.Yeheskel's wife Levana is at first the most strenuously opposed to the death machine. But as she slips into humiliating dementia she comes to crave it herself. At the first sign of that Yeheskel destroys his machine. He won't use it on her. Or rather, for her. Then he remembers serving his beloved's needs should trump his own, so he rebuilds it to let her die in comfort and dignity.The framing story of one Zelda provides the religious context. In the first scene she gets ostensible phone calls from God, advising her to continue her treatments because there's not yet a vacancy in heaven. At the end she lets on that she knew it was Yeheskel all along. When she gets his treatment it's interrupted twice by power failures. She takes that as a sign from God and resolves to live on. Thus we contrive a higher power to direct us, i.e., to let us do what we want.Even these modest saints remain human, too. The vet's lover — who literally comes out of the closet — is venal enough secretly to collect a fee for the service. He's banished from the group and the affair.When Yeheskel gives his Levana the last "duckie kiss," it's what he gives his granddaughter. The characters' playfulness expresses their essential childishness, a vestigial joy and innocence. As Levana tells the administrator, "Their bodies are old but they're still children inside." To their credit. Retired from work and responsibility they're free to be young again however they can. That's the last joy in life. So, too, the old veterinarian is still trying to find a way to tell his mother he's gay.The fall setting outside reminds us that death is just a part of the natural cycle. That continuity also impels the musical interlude where the dead join the living to sing about Neverland.This marvellous film is required viewing for governments considering regulations to allow for assisted suicides. They all should be. .

Nozz I'd like to give this movie a 10 for acting and a 2 for content, because it weighs in on the side of euthanasia, with humor and sentimentality, and euthanasia is a treacherously slippery slope. Who should be more aware of what can happen when society starts ending lives deemed not worth living than the Jewish Israelis who made this movie and the Germans, of all people, who godfathered it? But to give the movie its due, it includes fine acting, including many dynamic and demanding close-ups, from Ze'ev Revach, Levana Finkelstein, and the other major players. Revach won Israel's annual Best Actor award for this role, and the angelic Finkelstein, portraying a woman with incipient Alzheimer's, was unjustly passed over for Best Actress in favor of the colorless but personally popular Dana Ivgy. The movie also won awards for its cinematography (which, it's been complained, makes sheltered housing look too attractive) and for its soundtrack.