David Volach was raised in Jerusalem in an ultra-orthodox haredic community, in a household where he was one of 20 children. He left the faith in his 20s and studied film. This, his first feature, is his reflection on issues of extreme faith. But while it can be read as critical it is anything but a strident denunciation. Short (the end credits roll before the 70 minute mark) and often dreamlike, it follows in sometimes miniscule detail the life of a family of three. Rabbi Abraham (played with contextual irony by the noted Israeli actor Assi Dayan, son of the secular hero Moyshe Dayan) is the studious and devout leader of a Haredic sect. He and his wife Ester (Sharon Hacohen Bar) have one young son, Menachem (Ilan Griff), whose youthful curiosities about the world around him provoke questions that aren’t effectively answered by his father’s scholarly Talmudic lessons. We know this story will end tragically, both from the opening scene set at Menachem’s funeral and the less-than-subtle references to the Biblical story of Abraham. Yet that ending would seem to require a reaction of rage from a film that evokes more sadness at lives wasted in obeisance to barely understood laws. The details of the story are often abstruse, at least to a viewer who doesn’t share the filmmaker’s upbringing: Why does Ester write a note to her husband when she wants to tell him something (and why don’t we get to read what it says)? What possible purpose can there be to a commandment that requires a mother bird to be chased away from her nest, leaving her chicks to starve? But if Volach’s metaphors are often too broad to grasp, his attention to detail and mood is nonetheless striking, and My Father My Lord has a sureness that prods you to examine the questions it poses rather than write them off as weaknesses.

—m. faust