It might be a few hours after you leave the theater before it hits you how spiritual a film Seven Minutes in Heaven is. Galit (Reymond Amsellem) survives a suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus line, and must search for answers to those minutes immediately before and after the explosion that eventually took the life of her boyfriend.
Seven Minutes in Heaven screens on Sat., March 20 at 7 p.m. at Cinerama as part of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival.
Without giving too much away, it’s a short scene during Galit’s search, in which a yeshiva bocher who works with the ZAKA rescue organization and assisted in saving Galit’s life, that tells us so much: When a person dies and the soul ascends to heaven, there is a moment in which the body and soul come together that the person can decide his or her future.
Galit spent seven minutes clinically dead, but she came back to life and a year later needs to jump-start her memories from that horrific day. The movie opens with her shaving Oren, her boyfriend, who has been in a coma since the attack. After the opening credits, we’re at his funeral. So the film centers around Galit, coping with recovering from her injuries while building up the courage to enter crowded spaces and, understandably, board a bus.
It’s Purim, exactly a year after the explosion, that life starts to happen again for Galit. A necklace thought lost in the attack is returned in an anonymous letter. A mysterious man (Eldad Prives) begins to pursue her after she collapses outside of the Ben Yehud shouk. Her doctor tells her the day that she can finally remove the protective garment that shields her burns is rapidly approaching. And her search for answers to the circumstances of her rescue and what happened that day takes her on a strange and circuitous path to a place that is, unfortunately for us, a little too predictable.
But that flaw shouldn’t take away from the beauty of the film. Director Omri Givon, in his debut, has given us about 87 more near-heavenly minutes with Seven Minutes in Heaven.
The gravity of a film like Heaven hits hard when Galit visits a room at a police station that contains unclaimed items from the many attacks Israel has experienced. It hits again when, on the anniversary of the explosion, her mysterious stranger takes her to the bombed-out skeleton of that bus and she relives the terror all over again, this time with her soul and body meeting and taking her to a very different place.
Heaven is not for the faint of heart. The aftermath of the explosion is grisly, and don’t expect to walk out of the theater with your spirits uplifted. Heaven is dark, depressing and grave. But it’s solid, innovative and emotional filmmaking.
After the explosion
