Nimrod Eldar's The Day After I'm Gone, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on MUBI, is showing from June 18 – July 18, 2019 in MUBI's Debuts series.
The Day After I'm Gone is a road movie, a story of a journey.
A single father, whose daughter’s suicide attempt shakes his closed and impenetrable world to the core, is forced to acknowledge his vulnerabilities, his humanity and his debilitating fear of loss. And, furthermore, he is forced to come to terms with his weaknesses that he so laboriously suppressed—a very costly suppression that hurt everything and everyone he cared about.
The father, who cannot move past mourning his dead wife, who cannot accept the loss, discovers that his daughter is over identifying with his severe melancholy and latent suicidal urges.
I envisioned this father awakened in the middle of the night by the violent knocking of police officers: they have come to inform him that he is sleeping, sleeping too deep. He takes her on a journey to try and get these suicidal ideas out of her head, to try and bring her back to life, but it is he who eventually experiences such a transformation.
I tried to write a film that is not driven by narrative provocations of any kind. A film where everyone is “good,” and the dilemmas, or the internal tumult, are revealed in that evasive place where we have difficulties articulating to ourselves what is truly compelling us to act and to be.
No man is an island, and the ability to reconnect, to believe once again, and to be able to accept are all part of our hero’s journey. The end leaves him with a little more willingness to take action, to connect. The next time he hears the bells tolling he might not turn back, wondering.