Naomi’s Questions

Description

Trailer

Official Selections/Screenings
Haifa International Film Festival

Synopsis

The film follows Naomi Allon, 34, who lives with Williams syndrome. Having left home at 21, she claims her right to love, work, and independence. Filmed by her father over more than three decades in their Old Jaffa home, the film blends family archives, present-day scenes, and staged images into a father-daughter dialogue about care and freedom. Clear-eyed and intimate, it asks how we perceive difference and vulnerability. Inspired by the Kabbalistic idea of tikkun – the repair of the world – the film suggests that lives labeled fragile can illuminate how a society heals and makes space for ordinary dignity.

Director

Gérard Allon

A filmmaker and visual artist based in Tel Aviv–Jaffa. Working across documentary, hybrid cinema, and video art, he has filmed within his family for more than three decades, a practice culminating in Naomi’s Questions (2025). Earlier titles include Naomi’s Corset (2004), awarded at FIPA in Biarritz, and Fragments 1990–2006, which blends documentary and staged scenes. From 1974 to 1976, he completed an extensive photographic project and a documentary for Israeli television on Keshet, the first Jewish settlement near Quneitra in the Golan Heights. In 2022, the Ashdod Art Museum mounted Gérard Allon – A Retrospective, occupying the museum’s three floors and accompanied by a 280-page catalogue; galleries presented multichannel video works, photographs, and screenings of major films. A central figure in Israeli photography since the 1970s, Allon has also recorded over 200 theatre productions held by academic collections. His work consistently examines care, vulnerability, and ordinary dignity.