Synopsis
Jerusalem, Israel. Professors Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik, father and son, have dedicated their lives to the study of the Jewish scriptures. Eliezer is a stubborn and methodical scholar who has never been recognized for his work; Uriel is a rising star, someone admired and praised by his colleagues. The fragile balance that has kept their personal relationship almost intact is broken in an unexpected way by a simple phone call.
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Cast
- Shlomo Bar-AbaEliezer
- Lior AshkenaziUriel
- Aliza RosenYehudit
- Alma ZakDikla
- Micah LewensohnGrossman
- Nevo KimchiFingerhut
- Yuval ScharfNoa
- Daniel MarkovichJosh
- Tsipi GalMystery Woman
- Michael KoreshCommittee Member #1
Recommendations
- 100
Entertainment Weekly
Footnote is itself a perfect little piece of Talmud, full of text, commentary, and colorful argument. - 90
Boxoffice Magazine
Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a wry, wise little film that revels in the cataclysmic import of a life's most ostensibly trivial details. - 80
Time Out
Cedar's idiosyncratically brilliant script also has a moral question at its heart: Is lying to spare someone's feelings ever justified? Surely the Talmud has a thing or two to say about that. - 75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
A father-son academic rivalry provides fodder for this caustic comedy set in the Talmud Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. - 75
Movieline
What Cedar captures here is the way a father and son can be bound so tightly they almost choke the air out of one another. You can't exactly call it affection; it's that far more complicated thing we call kinship. - 75
The A.V. Club
The love, jealousy, and stubborn pride of the relationship between Ashkenazi and Bar-Aba is the heart of the film, and that makes the deliberately uncertain note of the ending particularly frustrating. - 70
Village Voice
Something between a comedy of everyday absurdity and a family tragedy pushed into the realm of the hyper-real, Footnote uses its characters' differing relationships to authenticity as the basis for an enigmatic riff on representation. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
Jewish and academically inclined audiences worldwide will respond to numerous aspects of this unusual drama, although it is paradoxically both too broad and too esoteric for the general art house public.
