Erez Tadmor, one of Israel’s top directors, has turned to his family history for his latest movie, Soda, which just opened in theaters on January 16.
Soda tells a compelling story of how trauma, in this case, Holocaust trauma, continues to haunt survivors and their children for the rest of their lives. It’s also a tragic romance starring two of Israel’s most popular actors, Lior Raz and Rotem Sela.
Tadmor is an extremely prolific and versatile filmmaker who released a drama film, Children of Nobody, about a shelter for orphans in south Tel Aviv in December 2023.
In 2024, his movie Matchmaking 2, a romantic comedy about dating in the ultra-Orthodox world that is a sequel to his 2022 film, was the box-office hit of the year, selling 300,000 tickets, a huge number in wartime Israel.
He had finished filming Soda,which he co-wrote with Shlomo Efrati, before the war broke out, he said, but he waited more than a year to release it.
“We all hesitated about releasing films after October 7,” he said. “With the heavy sorrow the country was facing, we didn’t know what was going to be with cinema, if people were going to go back to the movies at all. Who had the strength to go to a movie? Especially not to a dramatic movie.”
The real-life inspiration behind the movie
Soda was inspired by the story of Tadmor’s maternal grandparents and his mother. Lior Raz, the actor best known for Fauda but who has also had roles in movies outside the action/thriller world, plays Shalom Gottlieb, based on the director’s grandfather, who survived the Holocaust as a partisan in the Polish forests, killing Nazis and keeping a group of Jews alive.
“My grandfather died when I was about five, and my grandmother died not long after. But I remember how my mother told me the stories of how they fought in the woods, how they broke into places where Nazis were living and would kill them, how they blew up bridges.” It was much like a real-life version of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, he said.But while they carried out heroic feats during the war, their lives afterward were not easy.
“After the war, they were in a displaced persons camp, and then they came to Israel. That’s when the depression started. They came to the most beautiful place, which was like paradise, but they weren’t happy people; they came out of the war with terrible post-trauma. They were never calm, they looked for revenge, and they tried to settle scores with people who had betrayed them in the war.”
MANY TRUE stories about his grandparents and their friends he heard from his mother found their way into the film.
Shalom is a tough, charismatic man who lives near Tiberias in the 1950s with his wife, Gita (Netta Shpigelman), and their daughter, Esti (Sivan Tadmor, the director’s real-life daughter, playing a character based on her grandmother), who was conceived when they were partisans in the Minsk forest during World War II.
Shalom, who was one of the leaders of their group of partisan fighters in the war, has become the de facto leader of their neighborhood in Israel, and he has lost none of his swagger and street smarts, but he doesn’t quite know what to do with them.
Much of his life is consumed by settling scores and meting out street justice to anyone who dares steal from one of his friends.
He is the quality control manager of a seltzer factory, and he becomes aware that the glass bottles the cost-cutting owner uses will explode when the bottles are frozen, but the owner doesn’t want to hear about it.
If they were back in the forest, he would have known how to make him listen, but in this strange new world, blunt force can’t get him everything he wants and will likely just get him into trouble.
It certainly can’t get him a good life for his wife and daughter. Gita, who stayed strong in the snowy forests, has fallen apart now that her life is ostensibly so much easier.
Haunted by traumas and old injuries from her days in the woods, she can barely walk and rarely gets out of bed except to listen to a weekly radio program in which newscasters read messages from people who lost their loved ones in the Holocaust.
Gita’s whole family is gone, but she can’t accept it or move on. Esti is curious about what happened to them, especially when they talk about doing what had to be done to survive, and Shalom tells her it’s good that she doesn’t understand.
Things change for their family and the whole neighborhood when Ewa (Rotem Sela), a glamorous seamstress with a daughter, Hannah, about Esti’s age, moves in.
Gita has headed off to a rest home, and Shalom is drawn to Ewa, who, with her fashionable clothes she makes for herself and the piano she has schlepped from her previous apartment, is like a rare bird who has alighted in this drab neighborhood.
Esti and Hannah become friends, while Shalom soon falls hard for Ewa. Their romance is at the heart of the movie, and Raz and Sela have never been better. There’s real chemistry in their scenes together.
THERE IS a subplot about one of Shalom’s buddies, Asher (Zohar Strauss), who clings to the hope that his wife, who disappeared back in the woods, may have survived and tries to track down people who may have known the truth about her fate.
Stirring up old memories
Eventually, he stirs up old memories of some acquaintances, and Ewa is accused of having been a kapo in Auschwitz. She denies the accusation, but people question how her daughter survived the war if she weren’t a kapo.
Shalom is torn between his love for Ewa and his suspicion that she may indeed have been a kapo, a crime for which many were harshly punished in Israel and around the world by survivors after the war.
Tadmor said he and Sela researched the stories of kapos extensively, learning how they were forced into policing other concentration camp inmates and sometimes suffered sexual abuse.
Ewa wants to put the war behind her, and Shalom wants to believe only the best about his lover, but the tragedy is that so many people around them are not able to move on and mentally are still in the forests and the death camps.
“When he meets Ewa, he sees there can be a new life, a different life; he can find love, something that can be fantastic for a man like him. He’s so taken by her world of beauty and music and love,” Tadmor said. “But he can’t shake off their past trauma the way he wants to.”
Although Tadmor couldn’t have planned it, the movie is now being released at a time when another war seems to be ending, and those who survived and the bereaved families will be trying to pick up the pieces of their lives.
“There are 400 soldiers who were killed in this war; there are people who went through October 7; there are people who survived the massacre at the music festival and have already committed suicide. There are so many kinds of trauma that it will take them a long period of time to heal from them.
“And in a small way, it is reminiscent of what the people returning from the forests and from Auschwitz went through after World War II… All the characters in Soda, they all have their post-trauma, and I feel what happens in the film really reflects what people are going through today. I hope this war ends quickly, and soon we can really say that this war is over.”