Cafe Tales (2003)

• 70%
• 2003
• Comedy
• Drama
• Amit Lior
• Moshe Ivgy
• Aryeh Moskona
• Tzahi Grad

Cafe Tales is the story of five Israeli men and their efforts to save a local cafe from demolition. The film addresses in a comical and usually edgy way the ironies of fate and the difficulties of life, as well as representing a slice-of-life picture of contemporary Israeli society. The owner of the cafe is an ancient, grandmotherly, but nevertheless incredibly sharp-tongued and foul-mouthed lady named Leah Braun (Elisheva Michaeli), who remains committed to the cafe she and her late husband had built over thirty years, despite her daughter Nurit's (Tzipor Eisen-Lior) uncertainties about its continued viability. The narrator, Yutz (Moshe Ivgy), an out-of-work divorced poet, relies on the cafe as the center of his life, and has done so for 30 years, and assembles an unlikely group of four other cafe customers - approximately his friends - to help defend the cafe they have all loved, ultimately saving it from destruction by coming together through a complex machination of what initially appeared to be a series of unfortunate strokes of fate.