After being financed by the Gesher Multicultural Film Fund, Voyage avec mon pere, translated to A Journey With My Dad, premiered at the 2023 Bentonville Film Festival in the Competition Animation Films category.
The hand-drawn animated short follows a precocious 5 year old girl named Tamar as she accompanies her dad to a hotel for a vacation. Tamar is overjoyed to jump into the pool with all the other father and daughter duos, but grows increasingly impatient when her dad struggles to blow enough air into her floatie. She jumps in and is filled with curiosity upon seeing a man with one leg swimming underneath. Her curiosity is cut short when her dad pulls her out of the water. He gives her a menacing glare as he catches his breath.
Later that night, Tamar catches her father in the kitchen and discovers a secret about him that explains his mechanical breathing: there’s a hole in his chest. As the story takes on the point of view of Tamar, the world dips its toes into surrealism as she travels into his psyche and discovers the cause: war. As Tamar hides behind a rock from the bombs, she sees the pure terror in her father’s eyes. Back to reality, Tamar encourages her father not to hide his disability, and embraces him for who he is.
The two main characters are modeled on Tamar Surovich, the co-scriptwriter, and her father, who was severely wounded in a war and left physically disabled. Said Surovich, “My father was seriously injured during the Yom Kippur War. He became disabled, but his disability could not be seen at first sight. In my earliest childhood, I didn’t really understand why they said “disabled”. He looked like all the other dads, and he didn’t complain about anything…This film helped me better understand who he was, and to better understand how this injury and our relationship have built the person I have become.”
Tamar worked closely with her director Mor Israeli to create a story grounded in a father-daughter relationship. Said Israeli, “I wanted to deliver the story through the eyes of a little girl. When dealing with such a heavy subject that is not easy to digest, it was important for me to bring in a bit more softness and humor [through] using a surreal imagination for the girl. Another thing that was important for me was to make it…not just a local film about a war or a certain reality we Israelis grew up in. I wanted to focus on a relationship based story and capture an emotion that many people from different backgrounds can relate to.”
A Journey with My Dad is a beautifully hand-drawn 2D animated short that chooses not to use dialogue, instead completely relying on body language, gestures, sound effects, and soft colors to convey its narrative. The result is an emotionally poignant story that encourages us to embrace difference rather than shy away from it.
