Nor By Day Nor By Night

Set in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak, this absorbing and powerful drama from Jerusalem-born director Pinhas Veuillet is a meticulously detailed narrative centered around a conflict between Shmuel, the patriarch of a French Sephardic family, and the headmaster at his son’s school. Despite the boy’s educational qualifications and remarkable abilities as a star pupil, he is not accepted within a very prestigious, predominantly Ashkenazi Yeshiva; the family feels this is due to their Sephardic lineage. Unwilling to accept this reality, Shmuel takes action—which will lead to tragedy…[a] deeply personal work of a filmmaker who left a strict Orthodox community at a young age, later using cinema to explore the contours of the world he knew.