what is the girl from the testaments movie

In the course of his painstaking investigations, which turn up evidence of a systematic cover-up, Yoel accidentally happens upon a startling find: the face of his mother (Rivka Gur) flashes up in a restricted file, attached to a different name. And they underline the story’s thematic concern with truths buried beneath our feet: Yoel’s current project is getting the Austrian government to admit that a massacre of 200 Jewish forced laborers took place in the small village of Lensdorf during the waning days of the war, but his efforts are complicated because, after 21 excavations, he has not been able to locate the mass grave. Yoel ( Ori Pfeffer) is a leading Holocaust scholar working in a state-of-the-art research institute in Jerusalem - the wide shots in this location, with its clean, modern lines that seem to suspend people in white space above densely packed bookshelves, are among the most striking in an otherwise rather pallidly shot film. Given little reason to care about this man, it’s hard to care about his spiritual identity crisis.

It’s a potentially engaging, provocative topic, and criss-crosses with a richer subplot about a long-buried Holocaust mystery in clever and illuminating ways, but the film’s overall power is hampered by its forbiddingly unsympathetic lead character. It details a rigorously, frostily devout Jewish Israeli historian who discovers that the founding principle of his unyielding worldview is false. Though it may play better in festivals with a Jewish focus, to secular audiences, the main thrust of Amichai Greenberg’s sincerely intentioned but unnecessarily dour debut “ The Testament” is difficult to fully invest in.

What is the girl from the testaments movie