Cinema
But Where Is Daniel Wax?
לאן נעלם דניאל וקס?
Avraham Heffner · 1974
Synopsis
Benny Spitz, a singer in his thirties who has made it in the United States under the name Benny Ziv and married an Australian woman there, returns to Israel for a visit. At a reunion of former pupils in Haifa, he meets his friend Micha Lipkin, now a department head at Hadassah hospital, and asks what has become of Daniel Wax, the king of their class and the idol of the girls. Nobody knows. Benny devotes his stay to looking for him, from Haifa to Jerusalem and Sinai, among former classmates who speak of Wax with admiration without knowing where he has gone.
Context
Heffner wrote and directed the film, produced by Bill Gross; the cinematography is by Amnon Salomon. Ariel Zilber, then unknown, wrote the music and, with Ehud Manor, three songs sung by Lior Yeini, one of which remained attached to his name. The character of Benny is inspired by the singer Ran Eliran, a childhood friend of the director. No distributor wanted it: it was released only in 1974, at the Gordon cinema in Tel Aviv, and sold only 9,300 tickets. The Jerusalem Cinematheque reads in it a parable about the Zionist dream and its reality; the film is one of the emblems of the auteur cinema of those years.
Who it is for
A fiction film of an hour and a half to two hours, in Hebrew. It is worth knowing that the search for the missing comrade is also a search for the ideals of a generation.
Prizes and reception
Ignored on its release; in 2008, the critic Uri Klein ranked it second among the best Israeli films of all time.