 A scene from Tali Shalom Ezer’s “Surrogate.” Image courtesy of the filmmakers.Making the film brought upon a unique relationship itself through Shalmom Ezer and her Polish cinematographer, Radek Ladczuk. He agreed to do it after reading the script, and the two worked together despite a complete language barrier. He only spoke Polish, and she did. The two had a Hebrew-Polish translator, but only for the first two weeks, when the two went over the script. After that, they found ways of communicating outside of spoken language.
“For me it was great,” she said. “He didn’t understand the language of the dialogue, so he would only focus on what we wanted to express through body language and the image itself.”
Ladczuk’s presence also helped the film get some funding from Polish sources to help supplement their primary support care of the Rabinovich Foundation in Tel Aviv
“Funding was really smooth,” she said. “That’s the truth. Because they know me at Rabinovich. They supported my other films. In general, though, it’s not easy at all. We don’t have a lot of money in Israel for art and culture. So I feel very lucky, because I really feel I had everything I needed for this film. I mean, we didn’t get a lot of money, but it was enough. Just look at the professionals I got to work with. I got to choose Radick, and he’s not even from Israel. And all the other artists I got to work with, to me at that time felt like the best artists in the world.”
The film has already been screening in Israeli theaters for a month. After winning Best Feature Film at the 2008 International Festival for Women’s Films in Israel, Tali Shalom Ezer and producer Elad Gavish managed to find distribution through Israel’s Cinematheque - an art house cinema chain - despite the film’s distribution-challenged length.
“We faced a lot of negotiations with cinemas,” she said, “because they didn’t want to show ‘Surrogate’ by itself. They wanted to screen it with a short. And we couldn’t find the right short film. But we ended up getting distributed through Cinematheque - an art house cinema chain in Israel - where it’s been screening every day, twice a day, for one month now. And its still screening.”
As for Edinburgh, Shalom Ezer is heading into this weekend’s final screening of the film in high spirits. “The audience has been so receptive here,” she said. “In Israel, they would come up and talk to me, but I didn’t expect it to be the same here. But people have come up to me after screenings to tell me what they thought of the film… and even hug me! It’s been great.”
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