It was ten years ago that filmmaker Guy Nattiv felt ready to direct what he calls the “most personal movie I’ve done in my life.” But it took that full decade to get it to the screen.
The director, who won an Academy Award for his short film Skin and then went on to direct a feature of the same name, as well as films such as the Golda Meir biopic Golda, wanted to tackle a film inspired by the story of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who, in her middle age in the 1980s, joined a cult and made the decision to leave her family in Israel to follow its charismatic female leader to the United States, where she would later die.
Nattiv was young when his grandmother started to participate in activities held by the cult, which included talks, seminars and free dancing sessions. As a child, he was occasionally brought along to some of these events. “I didn’t exactly understand [what was happening],” he says. “I remember they took me out of school for seminars to dance with other people in a hotel room and stuff like that.”
Years after his grandmother departed for the US and later passed away, Nattiv, by then a film school graduate, read her diaries and letters and began researching the cult, eventually traveling to the location of its one-time compound and meeting with the relatives of other members. But he still felt unprepared to tackle the story, saying, “I wasn’t emotionally developed enough to dive in.” In the interim, he collected an Oscar and started a family, welcoming two children of his own. With this life and filmmaking experience, he finally felt ready.
