As Lilith

ZAKA is Israel’s emergency cleanup service, there to take your dead body, offer a bit of comfort and, most crucially, provide you with a proper Orthodox Jewish burial. As Lilith takes us to the tiny town of Zikhron Yaacov, where a teenage girl has committed suicide. Lilith, her strong-willed single mother, announces that she will cremate the body. ZAKA is disgusted and launches an intense battle to win the remains. Eytan Harris’s darkly funny film is filled with situations so bizarre — carried out by a cast of characters so crazy — that you’d swear it was all made up. But it’s not, and Harris, a skilled cinematographer and ace storyteller, is there to capture everything as it unfolds. As Lilith is an impeccably well-crafted film that uses fly-on-the-wall filmmaking to capture a completely off-the-wall story. —True/False