Orr Sigoli | להמשיך לנשום (Keep Breathing) / 2012

the event

by Douglas Messerli

 

Orr Sigoli (screenwriter and director) להמשיך לנשום (Keep Breathing) / 2012 [5 minutes]

 

A handsome young Jerusalemite, Hillel (Yiftach Mizrachi), wandering the streets one night, encounters his male lover Itamar (Gall Persinger) kissing a beautiful woman (Tomar Hannah Shtaierman). Terribly troubled by what he observes, he seeks out his friend who works as a tour guide with the local YMCA (Tal Kallai), unable emotionally to actually even reveal what he has observed.

    Hillel later sees the girl trying to lug a carpet into her apartment, a building evidently owned by Itamar. Helping her bring the carpet into her living space, he spots a flyer that announces a concert of her singing. Soon after, before he can even leave her apartment, Itamar shows up, both men playing as strangers, Hillel pretending to have been looking for an apartment to rent.

     Hillel attends the woman’s concert, titled “Keep Breathing,” where he is finally confronted by Itamar. The two of them go to the street, Hillel finally demanding an explanation, with Itamar simply responding that he doesn’t love him anymore, he loves the singer instead.

    Hillel wonders just how long Itamar imagines he can get away with lying about his sexuality. Or perhaps, Itamar has always been bisexual. Unfortunately, this short film makes utterly to attempt to even explain or reveal the men’s previous relationship or to clarify their true earlier relationship.

      All we can perceive is that a short fight breaks out, with Hillel finally having to abandon his former lover. He returns to his tour guide friend, planting a huge kiss on him, but even though it’s clear that his friend is in love with Hillel, he feels uncomfortable with the kisses since he isn’t Itamar. “Can’t you try to be,” Hillel pleads.

     But now as he heads off, Hillel must clearly come to the sad realization of what has just happened. Even a moment of their past life can’t resolve the future he now must face.

     It might have been a moving drama, emblematic of what often happens in gay relationships if only director Sigoli’s film had attempted to even slightly explore its characters and not just events.

As it stands, despite the beautiful images and people presented in the film’s frames, he might as well have recited the story since there is no full dramatization of how it came to be or what it was before the “event” to which Hillel has been witness.

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).