The 14th Annual Israel Film Center Festival runs June 9 through 16 in New York.
By Rachel M.
Fresh off an explosive sweep at Israel’s Ophir Awards — including a Best Actress win for the luminous Neta Riskin — Eti Tsicko’s stunning feature debut, Nandauri, made its highly anticipated New York Premiere last week at the 14th Annual Israel Film Center Festival.
The Israel Film Center Festival is the largest festival of Israeli films in New York City. Founded in 2012 at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, its core mission is to expand awareness of Israel’s thriving film industry and promote Israeli culture in America. The festival acts as a high-profile platform for showcasing the country’s diverse cultural narratives through some of its best new features, documentaries, shorts, and television programs. In addition to the film screenings, the programming heavily emphasizes community engagement, traditionally including red-carpet opening and closing nights, panel discussions, and intimate, post-screening Q&As/talk-backs with the directors, creators, and actors.
The interesting thing about of Nandauri’s inclusion is that most of the film does not take place in Israel. The film is a tense cross-cultural drama set against the snowy, stark landscapes of rural Georgia. Riskin plays Marina, an intense, sharp-witted Israeli lawyer of Georgian descent. She returns to the conservative, remote mountain village she fled as a child to retrieve an 11-year-old boy. The boy’s mother (Marina’s client) abandoned him as an infant to start a new life in Israel, but now wants him back. The title is a Georgian word meaning “The one I long for.”
Upon arrival, Marina confronts Dato (played by Roland Okropiridze), the boy’s uncle who has single-handedly raised him. He harbors deep, guarded resentment toward his sister for abandoning the family and is fiercely protective of the child. In this slow-burn psychological drama, Marina must convince Dato to assist her in obtaining permission for the child to leave Georgia to join his mother.
The heart of the film follows a charged, atmospheric road trip to Tbilisi as Marina and Dato navigate the complex bureaucracy of retrieving the birth certificate. The journey exposes deep-seated cultural, gender, and economic divides, bristling with complex psychological and sexual tension between the two leads. It’s an anti-sentimental look at cultural identity. It explores what “home” truly demands, contrasting old-world machismo with modern legalities, without painting the characters in simple black-and-white strokes.
Riskin anchors the film, balancing Marina’s modern, stylish, and defiant exterior with deeply buried childhood trauma linked to the oppressive patriarchy of the culture she thought she escaped. She clearly doesn’t want to be in Georgia any longer than necessary and is there only to serve her client.
The film is entirely in Georgian (with subtitles) which Riskin learned specifically for this role. The rest of the cast are native Georgians. Cinematographer Shai Goldman does an excellent job with an evocative use of color contrast — often placing Riskin in a vibrant, bright coat against the drab, snowy, and isolating backdrops of the rural Georgian landscape to visually highlight her alienation.
The story has many complex cultural and emotional layers, developed through a fairly short and small episode of these people’s interaction. In the course of a few days in Georgia, Marina discovers the other side of her client’s story and must advocate on her behalf in an antagonistic setting. A bit of an enigmatic character herself, Marina must resist her own personal triggers to accomplish her mission.
Nanduari premiered last week, but is available to watch online through June 23.
Find more information HERE.
