Shiira haas4/11/2023 ![]() ![]() Sometimes I don’t even touch it for days, but I always have it on set with me. Haas: I have a different notebook for each character - I’m actually going to choose the notebook for the character I’m currently playing. What’s one thing you absolutely must have on set? That’s her clock, so we wake up and cuddle for at least 20 minutes. Then there’s Gabi (Tamir Mula), a gentle hospital attendant Asia hires in the misplaced belief that she can arrange a teenage fling for her disabled daughter. When she’s not working at the hospital, she picks up extra cash bathing an elderly woman in her building and befriends her full-time caretaker, a Filipino guest worker whose decision to move to Israel for better pay entails a prolonged separation from her own daughter. Asia herself demonstrates a tenderness with her elderly patients that she can’t access when it comes to her own daughter. Yet the film excels in evoking the ecosystem of paid and unpaid caregiving that undergirds every society, and the uneasy intimacies that arise when we pay people to perform emotional labor. Neither the exact nature of Vika’s disease nor the reason for her sudden decline is ever explained, making the film’s central plotline too vague and unspecific to feel like an authentic portrait. When it comes to the depiction of terminal illness, “Asia” flounders. Their relationship, initially tense and gladiatorial, develops into something like a partnership only as Vika’s health deteriorates beyond repair. Her daughter, Vika (Haas), is a teenager burdened by all the usual troubles of adolescence - plus an unusually aggressive degenerative disease. Its titular character (played by Alena Yiv) is a Russian immigrant and single mother struggling to get by as a night shift nurse. Image by Barak Brinker, GettyĪ moody drama set in Jerusalem, “Asia” is a story of two women. Ruthy Pribar made a splashy directorial debut with “Asia,” an indie drama starring Shira Haas. Mostly, what they want is for you to see their film. When I asked if they had any tourist destinations in mind for their New York sojourn, they demurred. ![]() Meanwhile, Pribar is enjoying a remarkably successful directorial debut after working as a film producer and editor for over a decade. Known for her roles in the Netflix blockbusters “Shtisel” and “Unorthodox,” Haas is now cementing her status as a household name. We spoke via Zoom as they prepared for the American debut of “Asia,” a film directed by Pribar and starring Haas, at the Tribeca Film Festival. The chatty, informal vibe belied the big career moment that Haas, 26, and Pribar, 39, are very rightly enjoying. They may be two of the Israeli film industry’s most exciting up-and-comers, and they certainly spent much of the last year racking up awards at virtual film festivals while the rest of us baked sourdough, but they looked like old friends recovering from a long sleepover. That’s because they were curled up on a couch in Pribar’s Tel Aviv apartment, sharing the same blanket. Shira Haas and Ruthy Pribar wanted to make sure I wasn’t filming our interview. ![]()
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