Larry David returns just in time for America’s 250th independence anniversary, with a bitterly comic gift to the United States. His seven-episode HBO Max series, “The Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: A Nearly History of the United States,” premieres Saturday and places his familiar cranky persona from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” inside American history. The show offers satirical sketches about events such as the Boston Tea Party and the Wright brothers’ airplane, and it features a star-studded cast including Jon Hamm, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jerry Seinfeld and Barack Obama, who also serves as a producer and appears in several sketches.
In Tel Aviv, the annual White Night means traffic headaches, but also a possible outing for beer lovers. Schnit, the popular brewery at Givon Square, is opening from 9 p.m. for a guided tour with explanations of brewing ingredients and production, tastings, and food. The menu includes unusual beers such as Gordy, a Polish-style grodziskie, a cactus beer with local sabra fruit, and a Belgian wheat beer with coriander seeds, alongside fried pickles, chips, onion rings, burgers, sausages and wings. Admission costs 99 shekels.
At Gesher Theater, a new production of Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba” refreshes the familiar classic into a lively, urgent drama about control, repression and the struggle for freedom. Directed by Ido Kutton, it centers on five sisters trapped in their mother’s house after their father’s death, with Adela paying a heavy price for daring to love. Efrat Ben-Zur plays Bernarda, and the five actresses playing the daughters, Ophir Tsuigboim, Karin Seruya, Tali Osodchi, Nicole Podblani and Dror Roznboim, are singled out as excellent, along with Irit Ben-Zak as the servant Poncia.
On the fashion front, designer Hila Weinberg’s Biliblond swimwear line emphasizes fit for different body types rather than one standard silhouette. The summer collection includes the Belini top, which resembles a tank top paired with a low- or high-rise bikini bottom, Sael bottoms with corset-style details and shaping seams, triangle and more supportive tops, and the one-piece Jordan in pink and red. Weinberg says she wants to celebrate women’s bodies, and she photographs the suits on both thin and fuller models.
The International Student Film Festival opened Wednesday at Tel Aviv Cinematheque and runs through June 30, marking its 40th year. Organized by Tel Aviv University’s film school, it is one of the world’s major showcases for student and short films, and this year includes retrospective screenings of past participants who later became well known, such as J.A. Bayona and Cornelio Porumboiu. Guests include composer Evgeny Galperine, who will hold a master class, and filmmakers Guy Nattiv and Jamie Neumann, whose Oscar-winning short “Skin” and their film “Tatami” are part of the program.
Hebrew author Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel “The Director,” now available in Hebrew from Pen Publishing, revisits Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, a major director of the Weimar Republic. The historical novel follows Pabst’s career, his flight from the Nazis to Hollywood in the 1930s, his failed attempt there, his return to Nazi-annexed Austria, and the moral compromises of making films under the Third Reich. Critics have described it as a masterpiece about moral failure.
