Rocking Horse 1978

Ami Susetz, an Israeli artist, leaves his wife and daughter in New York and returns to his homeland after years apart. The film follows his quiet, persistent struggle to decipher a deep-seated sense of failure that colors every facet of his life—his humanity, his role as a family man, and his work as an artist. The burden weighs heavily on him as memories of what didn’t go right in the past press in from every direction. His sense of self seems fractured: he has no clear past to cling to, and the future feels uncertain.

Back in the country he reconnects with the people who shaped him, from his ailing father to his mother, who keeps trying to understand her son even as the distances between them stretch. A crucial element of the story is his renewed contact with a childhood friend, Ansberg, a figure who has transformed into a philosopher and, in a striking turn, a homeless seeker of unconventional solutions for love in Tel-Aviv. Ansberg, Shmulik Kraus in the role, embodies the bookish, desperate energy that pushes Susetz toward choices that blur the line between art and life. He pursues a vision that he calls “conscientious” love for the city, and he urges Susetz to join him in shaping a new atmosphere for the city’s pulse.

Yet Susetz himself cannot be the archetype of any ready-made virtue, not until he resolves the core questions about who he is, why he was born, and what it means to live. The drama becomes an inward expedition: he questions whether he can be more than the sum of his failures, whether there is a path to authenticity that does not betray the people closest to him, and whether his creative impulse can endure the pressure of personal reckoning. His decision to confront these questions leads him to an audacious project: to make a movie about his own life—about himself, his parents, and the city of Tel-Aviv, seeking to map the vast, messy landscape of human existence. The act of filming becomes a mirror that simultaneously exposes and distorts the truth, turning intimate turmoil into cinema.

The film-within-a-film resists a tidy resolution. It does not neatly solve the mystery of Susetz’s life and its tangled ties to family, memory, and city. In a paradoxical twist, the project achieves commercial success, becoming a blockbuster even as it fails to settle the very pattern it seeks to illuminate. This tension—between personal disquiet and public triumph—forms the emotional core of the narrative, a meditation on the unpredictable way art can reflect life while life remains stubbornly unfinished. The closing act intensifies the sense of ruin and renewal: the movie is destroyed, burned as if to erase the fragile attempt at synthesis, mirroring the earlier burning of his paintings and underscoring a deliberate, perhaps unsettling, intention behind the destruction.

Throughout this meditation on art, memory, and belonging, the film features a notable ensemble of performers. The cast includes Levana Finkelstein, Levana Finkelstein, along with Shmulik Kraus, who embodies Ansberg; Arieh Elias and Arik Lavie bring depth to the elder figures, and Josie Katz adds a crucial presence to the human mosaic that anchors the story. Their work lends texture to a narrative that remains steadfastly intimate while acknowledging the broader currents of a city and a world in flux. The result is a thoughtful, long-form reflection on who we are when our lives become art and our art, in turn, demands our honesty.