Tonnerre sur Mer

Between night and day, the hills of a village in Israel. The young Dekel tries pulling himself together from a painful break-up. Within the imprecision of a natural backdrop dipped into the sweetness of the moon, he stumbles upon his friend Doron whose lit-up shoes spread light visible kilometres away. Along with two other boys, they are going to spend the night talking away: talk as much as possible, in a final attempt to give life back to what they share. For his first film, Yotam Ben-David is only playing scales: Dekel’s, Doron’s, Udi’s and Rona’s bodies are shot as close as possible to smiles and gestures of barely sketched out seduction, or seem to be so far away like thunder, like tiny bright lighthouses looking for comrades who had not seen each other for a long time. Seated around a circle, the four young men unveil a more secret composition  whenever the camera captures them separately, highlighting their mental off-camera and the occasional side glances whose survival out of the frame we know nothing about. Savory drinks and narghile carry the weight of childhood and adult age stories about tough times, of fights and life as homosexuals. When the voices are silent for just a moment, we hear coyotes cry out: an indirect denunciation and evidence that, though words are still flowing, something between the boys is now dissolved. A lucid film, Thunder over Sea does not surrender and keeps blowing, for a fleeting moment, on the narghile’s brand to keep its flame burning. (V.P.)