December 25th

15 minutes of painstaking details, of calm patience, of everyday life in all its pointlessness. DECEMBER 25th, written and directed by Noa Erenberg, is a study of loneliness and being lost in a dark urban cityscape and in hollow, impersonal flats. Filmed matter-of-factly in muted, desaturated colours, we see our heavy-set protagonist, played with gravity and bitter poignancy by Carmen Maisonet, at everyday household work – emptying the ashtray, cleaning floors and windows, bringing out the trash. It seems to go on forever, and every miserably sedate step she takes makes us wonder: Why is this so very depressing?

 

We find out by several telephone conversations being played as a kind of voice-over. This woman is a cleaning lady, and we watch her do her tedious job with understandable melancholy on Christmas Day. Carmen, we find out during her phone call home to South America, where her kids have remained with her sister, is also an illegal immigrant in Israel who doesn't speak the Hebrew and doesn't have a work permit. Her hardship, her dramatic fate of being separated from and literally disconnected with her children, the lies, the underground life in Israel, find their contrast in the banality of her job: dusting, cleaning, scrubbing the toilet, doing the laundry, opening the shutters, disposing of old flowers. The flowers have died, it's a miserable life. She has just heard that her children don't believe in Santa any more. They will have to grow up without her.

 

DECEMBER 25th is a shattering study of homesickness and melancholy. Carmen experiences a second hand life, through others peoples apartments, through the vivid descriptions of the lively Christmas celebration of her folks back home – while she in person never meets anyone during the course of the film. And even this second hand life threatens to slip away from her: Her son won't talk to her any more, and most of the time she only reaches her family's answering machine anyway.  Noa Erenberg shows illegal immigration, even when successful (in a way), as an utterly miserable experience of longing and being homesick, and his great patience in laying out the depressing details of Carmen's life only adds to this masterful short's impact.

 

Interview with Noa Erenberg

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