Cemetery Club

Feisty seniors trek up Mount Herzl-the final resting place of Theodor Herzl and other Israeli luminaries-with folding chairs in tow for their weekly Saturday meetings in Tali Shemesh's documentary THE CEMETERY CLUB. But it isn't in the cemetery, it's next to the cemetery, insists founding member and the director's great aunt Lena. Nevertheless, the name sticks. Shemesh spends five years filming pernickety Lena and her unassuming sister-in-law Minia (Shemesh's grandmother), lifelong friends who endured hardships from growing up in the Polish ghetto, to surviving Auschwitz, to losing their husbands. Over the last twenty years, Lena and Minia have been members of the “Academy,” as they call it, formed to assuage the loneliness of old age. While the members (always changing) eat their lunch in the shade, discussion topics range from poetry, to philosophy, to politics. This oftentimes comic and altogether touching film enchants with a story that is both personal and universal, exploring questions of life, aging, and death. (In Hebrew and Polish with English subtitles) – E.J.B.