‘Golda’ filmmaker’s next film is inspired by his Holocaust survivor grandmother’s joining a cult – Kveller

Movies

“Harmonia” will star Naomi Watts as Guy Nattiv’s grandmother, who left her family in Jerusalem in the 1980s to join a cult in Virginia.

Israeli filmmaker Guy Nattiv’s next film will be his most personal project to date. While “Golda,” his 2023 biopic about Israel’s first female prime minister, Golda Meir, brought him closer to the life story of his father, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War, he will now tell a gripping story about something that tore his family apart.

Nattiv recently announced that his next feature film will be titled “Harmonia,” and is based on the story of his grandmother who joined a cult.

The film already boasts an all-star cast, including Naomi Watts, who will play his grandmother, Rita, or at least a character based on her, who becomes fascinated by a cult leader played by Vicky Krieps (“Phantom Thread”). Bella Ramsey (“The Last of Us”) and Odessa Young will play her daughters, who try to get her out of the cult, only to be drawn into the cult leader’s “labyrinthine network of psycho-spiritual manipulation,” according to the synopsis. of the film. .

“My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor,” Nattiv told Ynet in 2020. “At age 55, when she began suffering from depression and post-trauma from the Holocaust, she met , through her beautician, a charismatic woman who really influenced her. . She was later discovered to be the head of a sect in Jerusalem called Harmonia.

Nattiv went on to explain that she “then got drawn into that world, left my grandfather and severed her ties with the family. The cult leader, whose name is Nogah Lord, basically moved these women from Jerusalem to a remote farm in Virginia, and that’s where my grandmother lived. She was his right-hand woman and you see how her daughters try to save her (in the film). She died there.

According to Nattiv, his grandmother, who died in 1997, is buried somewhere in Buckingham, Virginia, where the cult’s farm was located.

His grandfather Reuven and Rita lived on Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot. They were both Polish survivors who met in their youth after the war. For his grandfather, the greatest revenge was having children and grandchildren. “I didn’t grow up with Superman and Spider-Man, my grandfather and grandmother were my heroes,” Nattiv explained in that same interview with Ynet. Nattiv dedicated his Oscar-winning film “Skin” to his grandfather, who gave him his blessing to make a film about a neo-Nazi, but who did not live to see the film himself and died before it was completed at age 94.

“I waited decades until I was emotionally ready to confront the story of my beloved grandmother, who has haunted my family since I was a child,” Nattiv explained in a recent press release. . “As a woman in the 1980s experiencing a mid-life crisis, my grandmother made the radical choice to leave my family and become part of an all-female cult, in an obsessive quest for happiness and meaning. The heart of this film is today’s very real, seductive and spendthrift threat of coercion and manipulation by any dominant personality cult. I am honored to collaborate on my most personal film with the brilliant Naomi, Vicky, Bella and Odessa, who will bring their extraordinary talents to the terrifying and unique world of “Harmonia.”

Nogah Lord is still a spiritual teacher, although she had apparently previously worked on the side of film, as a typist at Columbia Studios. She then became a dancer. According to her website, it was through dance that she began to communicate directly with God. She later took up meditation and traveled to India to study at religious leader Babaji’s ashram. According to the biography posted on her website, which Lord uses to sell inspirational postcards and posters, she is currently building a healing center in Portugal.

Nattiv’s wife, Jamie Ray Newman, who shared the Oscar with him for “Skin,” will co-produce the film through their company, New Native Film. Julia Lebedev, Eric Viasman and Oren Moverman are also all signed on as producers. Nattiv co-wrote the screenplay with Noa Berman-Hertzberg, who previously collaborated with Nattiv on the 2010 film “Mabul.” Berman-Herzberg also co-wrote the animated short “Holy Holocaust,” about two friends Israelis and Germans whose friendship is shaken when they realize that the latter is the daughter of a notorious Nazi. The film is based on Berman-Herzberg’s friendship with author Jennifer Teege, the granddaughter of SS commander Amon Göth.

Filming on Harmonia is expected to begin this fall.