Longing

Every month, Michal immerses in a mikveh as part of a religious ritual before she and her husband can resume marital relations. When the long-awaited night arrives, nothing happens between the two. Her husband's growing absence, and the steady erosion of intimacy between them, leads her to suspect that he is keeping a truth about himself she is not meant to know. Set within a devout community where such questions cannot be spoken aloud, Nadav Mishali's Israeli short Longing offers a human portrait of an introverted woman who is losing her sense of herself as a wife and a woman, and burning quietly with desires she has no place to put. Nelly Amar gives a restrained, deeply felt performance in a film about faith, silence, and the loneliness of a marriage built on an unspoken secret.