The film's theme song is "Animated Movies" recorded by Maya Maron. The film's soundtrack was released by Helicon Records.
Plot
The unexpected death of the family patriarch throws every member of the Ullmann clan off course. Widow Dafna takes to bed for three months and when she finally returns to her job at the maternity hospital, she has little time for her children. Eldest son, Yair drops out of school and adopts a fatalist attitude, shutting out his siblings and girlfriend. His twin sister Maya, a talented musician, feels the most guilt and is forced to act as a family caregiver at the expense of career opportunities. Bullied at school, younger son Ido responds by obsessively filming himself with a video camera and attempting dangerous feats. The baby sister, Bar, is woefully neglected. Preoccupied with their own misery, the family is barely a family anymore. When another tragedy strikes, will they be able to support one another?
Academic Critique
According to academic research, despite Israeli filmmakers' left-leaning tendencies, fictional films largely omit the occupation and terror attacks, replacing direct representations with arbitrary causes of death, as seen in Broken Wings. The film depicts a family's mourning following the death of the father, caused by a bee sting rather than political violence. This choice reflects a broader trend in Israeli narrative cinema to avoid directly engaging with the traumas of terror attacks or the occupation during the Second Intifada. The arbitrariness of the father's death symbolically displaces the tragic randomness of terror attacks, highlighting a tendency toward repression in fictional representations of national trauma.[1]
Reception
Variety called it "a strongly emotional experience despite its tendency toward cryptic dramatics."[2]
