A turkey farm is heaven and hell for multigenerational family in Israeli film Baba Joon
Points: 8
Set in an immigrant Persians’ moshav in the Negev during the early 1980s and mostly spoken in Farsi, Baba Joon is Israel’s foreign-language Oscar entry of last year. Written and directed by Yuval Delshad, it’s an unusually assured debut feature that works very well on two levels at once: as an appealing coming of age story, and as an honest meditation on the tensions between three generations regarding what one should do with his life — and where to do it.
There are three generations in the Morgian family, which owns a broken-down turkey farm in a remote community of Farsi-speakers. There’s the grandfather (Rafael Faraj Eliasi), the family’s patriarch and a stubborn old man who built the farm long ago. Then there’s Yitzhak (Navid Negahban), who moved from Iran when he was a kid and was forced by his father to run the farm almost ever since. Then, there’s Moti (Asher Avrahmi), Yitzhak’s 13-year-old son who has a knack for fixing cars and hates the turkey farm with all his heart. Last, but not least, there’s Sarah (Viss Elliot Safavi), Moti’s caring mother who tends to favour her son over any dispute with his father.
There’s also another significant character that appears in the third act, Darius (Fariborz David Diaan), Yitzhak’s brother, who left the family home long ago and moved to the US — he knew what he’d have to do if he stayed at the farm, that is to say, live with turkeys forever, like the rest of the family. And that’s not a pretty sight.
As a coming of age story, Baba Joon carefully confronts father and son in everyday circumstances that are almost always related to farm work. While the grandfather and the father belong to the migrant generation and want to stick to their traditions, Moti is younger and couldn’t care less about the past and instead wants to walk along a new road. In fact, he wants to move to his uncle’s home and perhaps work with jewellery — or do anything else but turkeys.
One of the outstanding traits of Baba Joon — the title is a Persian term of endearment that a son can use to address his father — is that it eschews all sorts of melodramatic confrontations between the three generations where the eldest could be easily demonized and the youngest would be a suffering victim. This is not how things are, for Baba Joon would rather go for realism than anything else.
So what you have, instead, are family members trying to understand one another, even when it may not seem so at first sight. Because the point here is that understanding that everybody has their reasons implies that some of the axioms you hold are to be left aside. And that’s always threatening and even subtly disturbing. Such underlying tensions result in an eloquent contrast that speaks about a divide as much as about the willingness to come to terms. Walking along this thin line is not easy at all, but filmmaker Yuval Delshad does a very good job at it.
Then there’s also the mix between professional and non-professional actors — another element that adds up to realism. Avrahami and Eliasi are non-pros and they deliver fresh, compelling performances that blend seamlessly with those of the pros. Likewise, the production design feels naturalistic at all times, and this a film shot on location, then there you have all you need for a great combo.
Emotional and honest, Baba Joon boasts nuanced characters — except perhaps for that of the mother, which is pretty one dimensional — and it keeps its tone from beginning to end, eschewing commonplace as much as possible. That’s a lot to say for a debut film.
Production notes
Baba Joon (Israel, 2015) Written and directed by Yuval Delshad. With Asher Avrahami, David Diaan, Navid Negahban, Elias Rafael, Viss Elliot Safavi. Cinematography: Ofer Inov. Editing: Yoni Tzruya. Running time: 91 minutes.
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