Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
Yedaya's prizewinning debut film is acted and directed with uncommon psychological realism.
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France, Israel · 2004
1h 35m
Director Keren Yedaya
Starring Ronit Elkabetz, Dana Ivgy, Meshar Cohen, Katia Zinbris
Genre Drama
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Or shoulders a lot: she's 17 or 18, a student, works evenings at a restaurant, recycles cans and bottles for cash, and tries to keep her mother Ruthie from returning to streetwalking in Tel Aviv. Ruthie calls Or "my treasure," but Ruthie is a burden. She's just out of hospital, weak, and Or has found her a job as a house cleaner. The call of the quick money on the street is tough for Ruthie to ignore. Or's emotions roil further when the mother of the youth she's in love with comes to the flat to warn her off. With love fading and Ruthie perhaps beyond help, Or's choices narrow.
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
Yedaya's prizewinning debut film is acted and directed with uncommon psychological realism.
Doggedly refusing artifice as if cinematic beauty were a filthy capitalist plot, Yedaya drowns her characters in realist grit, a colorless screenplay and no score to speak of, rendering this open book of a movie alienating in all the wrong ways.
Village Voice by Jessica Winter
The scoreless Or (My Treasure) consists solely of stationary shots that, while sometimes awkwardly composed, build in organic momentum and bracing detail.
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Insofar as they're implicitly the spoils of war, this movie seems to be meditating on the whys and hows of the spoiling process -- raising more questions than can possibly be answered, and in this sense, at least, far from dogmatic.
For long stretches, Or is a dialogue-heavy kitchen-sink drama, but its naturalistic style and unselfconscious performances give it an intensity that only builds as it progresses.
Israeli director Keren Yedaya's remarkable debut feature, which won the 2004 Cannes Film Festival Camera d'Or, is a powerful study of a teenager's willingness to do anything to save her mother, a Tel Aviv prostitute who may be well beyond salvation.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
A work of exceptional subtlety and is all the more captivating and heart-rending for being so.
Consistently engaging, non-judgmental and cumulatively powerful two-hander marks a noteworthy feature debut for Israeli helmer Keren Yedaya.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
This well-meaning but irritatingly naïve feature delves into the horrors of prostitution, or more accurately, the filmmaker's horror about the subject.
Like mother, like daughter best sums up Or (My Treasure), a raw drama.
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