Soda draws on Erez Tadmor’s family experiences by placing trauma front and center with solid performances from leads Lior Raz and Rotem Sela. The film couldn’t be more different from the filmmaker’s comedies, Matchmaking and Matchmaking 2.

This was the third film directed and co-written by Tadmor that I’ve watched this week. One gets the sense while watching that Soda is a very personal film for the filmmaker. After all, it’s dedicated to his grandfather, who survived as a partisan and died when the filmmaker was a child. Because of timing an everything, the filmmaker chose to wait before releasing the film. Nobody can blame him for this. A film touching on themes of guilt and survival is not an easy watch, least of all during an active war impacting the entire State of Israel. Personally speaking, comedies are an easier watch right now than dramas.

Talk to many Jews and a common recurrence–especially post-October 7–is discussion of generational trauma. You could say it’s our inner Spidey-sense if you will. We have this way of knowing when the Jewish experiment in certain countries have run out of time or it’s time to go. If not now, when, am I right? What we have here are a group of Holocaust survivors who have settled in nicely to their Israeli neighborhood a decade after the Holocaust and World War II and work at a soda factory. All is going well until some comes back into the fold and breaks some news so to speak.

Soda opens with a prologue in then-Poland’s Pinsk Forest in 1944, setting the tone for what’s to come over a decade later in 1955. Come a decade later, many of the same partisans are living in the same working-class neighborhood along the coast and working at a soda factory.

Eva, a seamstress, recently moved into their Israeli working-class neighborhood with her daughter, Hannah (Anastasia Averbuch). Shalom Gottlieb (Lior Raz), who led a group of partisans in the forest during the Holocaust, has an affair with her while wife Gita (Netta Shpigelman) is in the hospital. Shalom has done his best to start a new life in Israel while Gita has trouble moving on. He’s working as a quality control manager at the soda factory. When former partisan Janek reunites with other partisans, his wife, Miriam, tells Shalom that Eva is a Kapo. Shalom does his own investigation but once word starts getting out, the damage is done.

Part of the trouble is another partisan, Asher (Zohar Strauss, in an Ophir-nominated role), getting back at Shalom for what happened during the war. Asher held out hope that his wife was still alive, only to learn the truth from Janek. It puts events into motion that will change the neighborhood and other relationships. It feels like many of them are still fighting the war rather than make an attempt to move on and start a new life. The trauma is all too real, even a decade later. I certainly cannot blame them for holding onto their trauma.

In as much as love is a theme in the film, so, too, is guilt and survival. We can especially see this play out through Shalom and Gita’s relationship and how it impacts their daughter, Esti (Sivan Tadmor). She’s curious about their life before she was born, having been conceived while her parents were living in the forest and fighting for survival as partisans. There’s no doubt that the generational trauma has been passed down to her, especially with her parents living through the Holocaust. It’s one thing to hear the stories but it’s another thing to live through the trauma. The trauma stays with you for the rest of your lives.

Speaking of trauma, it is not an easy time watching a Holocaust movie, let alone one dealing with the trauma. The past 16 months have been traumatic enough and Thursday, when I watched the film, was not any better. And yet, Erez Tadmor has a family story to tell in Soda. I’m only hoping that the third act is taking liberties for dramatic purposes. I’d expand more on this but following its Israeli release last year, Soda is currently playing the Jewish and Israeli film festival circuit. As such, I won’t be discussing certain spoilers in the film.

DIRECTOR: Erez Tadmor
SCREENWRITERS: Erez Tadmor, Shlomo Efrati
CAST: Lior Raz, Rotem Sela, Netta Shpigelman, Zohar Strauss, Sivan Tadmor

Soda holds its Atlanta premiere during the 2025 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. Upcoming festival screenings include the Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema. Grade: 3.5/5

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