''Three Days and a Child'' (, translit. ''Shlosha Yamim Veyeled'') is a 1967 Israeli

drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. The drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular ...

directed and co-written by

Uri Zohar Uri Zohar ( ; 4 November 1935 – 2 June 2022) was an Israeli film director, actor and comedian who left the entertainment world to become an orthodox rabbi. Biography Uri Zohar was born in Tel Aviv. His parents were History of the Jews, Polis ...

. It is a modernist adaptation of a short story of the same name by A. B. Yehoshua and draws on the techniques and sensibilities of

French New Wave The New Wave (, ), also called the French New Wave, is a French European art cinema, art film movement that emerged in the late 1950s. The movement was characterized by its rejection of traditional filmmaking conventions in favor of experimentat ...

cinema.Judd Ne'eman, "Israeli Cinema," in Oliver Leaman, ed., ''Companion Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Film'' (Routledge, 2001), p. 311.

Plot

Eli (

Oded Kotler Oded Kotler (; born 5 May 1937) is an Israeli actor and theatre director. He is best known for his role in the film '' Three Days and a Child'' (1967), for which he received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor The Best Actor Award ( ...

) is a young graduate student in math who lives with his girlfriend in

Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...

. He agrees to babysit Shai ( Shai Oshorov), the young son of his beloved former girlfriend, Noa (Judith Solé), and her husband. Eli and Shai spend three days touring Jerusalem, as Eli relives painful memories of his life with Noa on the

kibbutz A kibbutz ( / , ; : kibbutzim / ) is an intentional community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The first kibbutz, established in 1910, was Degania Alef, Degania. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economi ...

and her subsequent rejection of him. Uncertain if he is the child's father, Eli's feelings towards Shay are ambivalent and for unexplained reasons (perhaps resentment, anger, jealousy, alienation, boredom, or guilt) he plays dangerous games with the boy.

Cast

- Eli * Shai Oshorov - Shai *

Judith Solé The Book of Judith is a deuterocanonical book included in the Septuagint and the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian Old Testament of the Bible but excluded from the Hebrew canon and assigned by Protestants to the apocrypha. It tells o ...

- Noa * Misha Asherov - Shai's father * Illi Gorlitzky - Zvi * Germaine Unikovsky - Yael (as Jermain Unikovsky) *

Stella Ivni Stella or STELLA may refer to: Art, entertainment, and media Films * ''Stella'' (1921 film), directed by Edwin J. Collins * ''Stella'' (1943 film), with Zully Moreno * ''Stella'' (1950 film), with Ann Sheridan and Victor Mature * ''Stella'' (1955 ...

- Neighbor * Baruch David - Neighbor's husband * Shoshana Doar - Yael's mother *

Nissan Yatir is a Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan. The company sells its vehicles under the ''Nissan'' and ''Infiniti'' brands, and formerly the ''Datsun'' brand, with in-house performance tuning pr ...

- Yael's father

Themes

According to one student of Israeli film, ''Three Days and a Child'' "ostensibly . . .sets up a dichotomy between li'salienated life in Jerusalem and the kibbutz idyll. His life in the city is characterized by loneliness, despair, estrangement from his lover and a ''mise-en-scène'' that stresses desolation, graves and thorns. In the hero’s consciousness, his kibbutz past is a memory of first love, flowering fields and flowing water. Yet . . . this perception of the protagonist is not so clear cut: life in the kibbutz wasn’t so harmonious, whereas his life in Jerusalem was not so terrible."Eldad Kedem
''The Kibbutz and Israeli Cinema: Deterritorializing Representation and Ideology''
(PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2007), p. 78 (retrieved 12 November 2012).

Critical reception

''Three Days and a Child'' was a great success, critically and commercially, selling some 308,000 tickets. It was entered into the

1967 Cannes Film Festival The 20th Cannes Film Festival took place from 27 April to 12 May 1967. Italian filmmaker Alessandro Blasetti served as jury president for the main competition. The ''Grand Prix du Festival International du Film'', then the fetival's main prize, ...

where it was nominated for Best Film and

won the award for Best Actor.

References

External links

* {{Authority control 1967 films 1960s Hebrew-language films Films about the kibbutz 1967 drama films Israeli black-and-white films Films directed by Uri Zohar Israeli drama films Films scored by Dov Seltzer