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LAST SHABBAT

DERNIER SHABBAT

JLFILMSPRODUCT - as PROD / FIN

Jewish - Completed 2023

- Year of production
- 2023
- Genres
- Jewish, Family, Comedy
- Countries
- FRANCE
- Languages
- FRENCH
- Budget
- 0.6 - 1 M$
- Duration
- 90 mn
- ISAN
- 0000-0006-F835-0000-9-0000-0000-A
- Synopsis
- According to one of the laws of Halakha, Hebrew law, only Jewish women beget Jewish children, regardless of the religion of the progenitor. Thus, this law systematically excludes children born to non-Jewish mothers, even if the father is Jewish.
  
  The story takes place in Paris, before the pandemic, on a Friday night, the evening of Shabbat, in the apartment of a Jewish grandmother of Sephardic origin who recently died.
  
  His apartment having to be vacated, all the characters gathered there, as they usually did, every Friday evening, to celebrate a last Sabbath in this apartment.
  
  This great event brings together the two children still alive of the grandmother. There is his son Rabby SAMUEL, passing through Paris on this occasion, an influential rabbi highly respected in the community and his daughter ESTHER with her seven children, a mixture of believers and laymen, practitioners, and non-practitioners.
  
  ESTHER is a widow. She has 2 daughters and 5 boys. His two daughters-in-law are Christians and have, therefore, fathered 4 children, all non-Jews.
  
  It is in a warm atmosphere, typical of Sephardic family gatherings, that this beautiful evening takes place, accompanied by flashbacks featuring the characters attracted by the temptations of modern life, in contradiction with their desires to maintain ancestral customs and above all, in total contradiction with the intransigence of the rabbis.
  
  Over the course of the evening, gradually, the retrospects show us the suffering of the boys of this family, torn between their love for their non-Jewish companions and the obscurantism of the religious who systematically reject their children. Doubts also invade girls, who are supposed to be the progenitors of the future and therefore of the survival of the Jewish people. They, too, are confronted with the pressure of their culture, which forces them to make no deviation from their religion.
  
  ETHAN, our main character, IDF (Tsahal) officer is on leave in Paris. It is the common thread of these flashbacks, staging the way the characters apprehend anti-Semitism, the rejection of their wives and children by their own community, their fears in the face of the growing number of those who hate them, the fear of seeing their people no longer be able to defend themselves and gradually fade away at the risk of disappearing.
  
  At the end of the evening, a surprising and unexpected discovery, will make this Sabbat, for the members of Esther's family, their last Sabbath...