Intimate Grammar

Aharon is a boy who refuses to grow up—not in the Peter Pan way, but like a distant relative of Oskar, the young boy in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum who stops growing due to uncomfortable circumstances. Aharon is the young son of the Kleinfeld family of Jerusalem in the early 1960s. With a senile grandmother, an absent-minded father, a bitter and domineering mother, friends who compete over his young romantic desires and echoes of the Holocaust in the background, Aharon has stopped developing on the outside even as he creates an exaggerated inner world where a bizarre language takes over reality. By turns melancholy and poetic, allegorical and painfully real, Intimate Grammar brings together two great talents who have excelled in the creation of moving stories about adolescents: author David Grossman (on whose The Book of Intimate Grammar the film is based), one of the most internationally celebrated Israeli voices (See Under: Love, Someone to Run With); and filmmaker Nir Bergman, whose depictions of young lives include the poignant Broken Wings (developed from his short Sea Horses, SFJFF 2004) and the character of the troubled teen athlete of In Treatment (SFJFF 2009). Intimate Grammar won the Sakura Grand Prix at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

Born in Haifa, Israel, in 1969, Director Nir Bergman moved with his family to Ein Hod, an artists village in 1983. He specialized in artistic photography at the WIZO high school. In 1987 he began serving with the Israeli Defense Forces. Nir studied at the Tel Aviv University in the Liberal Arts program and took part in the actors workshop led by Roberto Polak. In 1996 Nir received the Miki Albin prize for best short script for Sea Horse (Sus Yam) at the International Haifa Film Festival. Director Bergman graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School - Jerusalem in 1998. His film SEA HORSES is his diploma film. FILMOGRAPHY Aquarium, 1994, video, 4 minutes. One Perfect Rose, 1996, 9 minutes.