Tehilim

directed by Raphael Nadjari, cinematography by Laurent Brunet, AFC

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Raphaël Nadjari and Laurent Brunet worked together for the first time in 1998. It was their first experience, respectively as a director and a photographer. The Shade was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.
Tehilim (Psalms) marks the fifth collaboration of a duo who never parted since and now ends up on the Croisette. Entirely shot in Jerusalem and in hebrew, Tehilim tells of the mysterious disappearance of a father that leaves the family dumbfounded.

Laurent, this is your fifth collaboration with Raphaël. Can you talk about this singular director?

As a filmmaker, Nadjari asks essential questions regarding life and religion. This very interrogation makes him, to my eyes, a universal filmmaker, constantly searching. With Tehilim, he states his will to gather, questioning the contradictions between orthodoxy and traditionalism. He would like to find a compromise, but without giving out solutions.

How does he work, concretely?

Raphaël Nadjari often starts with a simple story, without any spoken dialogues. Improvisation plays a distinctive part in his working with actors. The script evolves day by day, even minute by minute. It evolves all through the shooting and editing processes, till the end. Every new step is like a rewriting of the film. This is how his cinema is created. Because of the economic, logistic and time-related constraints (we had a twenty-day shooting) we are fully engaged into the film even beyond its mere “construction”. Maybe within these very limits are we able to find a kind of liberty.

Can you describe your technical choices and explain how things went during shooting?

This being my fifth film with Raphaël Nadjari, I think I could trust him enough to free myself from technical considerations. We spent very little time (7, 8 days) preparing and not much longer researching locations, of course. Often I would happen on locations where I had never set foot prior to shooting.
On Tehilim, we chose to shoot handheld, with a small crew, for mobility was crucial in the rehearsing process. Language is something you search and figure out day by day while shooting.
We tried to find a simple way of filming, all the while working on shot duration and keeping a certain intimacy with the actors. Handheld camera got more instinctive, less obvious. I would move inside a sequence without ever interrupting the actors’ flow in order to have both wide and close-up shots.

Much like on Avanim, the first of his films shot in Israel, we shot in HD, out of economic rather than technical reasons at first.
We set our choice on a F900 Sony camera equipped with a Pro 35 and a wide opening Zeiss series. Our desire for this story was to capture a warmer and rounder image than what might be obtained with video. I must say the Pro 35 was of great help, but this tool comes with technical constraints I had probably underrated for fiction.
2 diaph loss and 1.3 aperture all through the shooting…
The picture is sometimes fragile and uncompromised – a choice which we assume completely.

(Interview conducted by Brigitte Barbier for the AFC and translated from French by Mathilde Bouhon)