THE WEDDING PLAN is a delightful comedy about a woman, Michal (played by Noa Koler), who desperately wants to get married, but after a broken engagement, her prospects are slim. However, this does not stop Michal from throwing herself headfirst into the dating game, hoping to secure a husband by the last night of Hanukkah.
Director Rama Burshtein spoke to The Moveable Feast about the inspiration for the story: “I feel what we really lack is hope. It’s like despair grabs us every morning — me, anyway, and with love, we don’t believe that it can really happen. I’m married, and even when you’re married, you don’t believe it can really happen. [laughs] And that movement between hope and despair, we have to really get used to it because this is our movement, and I felt that this is what I want to say. Find hope where it looks like there’s no hope at all and that’ll keep everything moving.”
For Burshtein it was important to capture that hope as well as the whimsy normally found in romantic comedies. This creates a playful aesthetic that blends reality with fantasy. Burshtein notes, “I think life is more fantastic than even films, so this is kind of the mixture between what’s bigger and what’s stronger — life [or] cinema. Life is simply so fantastic at times that you say you wouldn’t believe it if it was in a film, and sometimes you see something in a film and you say, ‘My life is never like this.’”
