Leaving Paradise

Reviews

• A wide-ranging documentary epic that depicts with a humane, loving and curious look the formation and disintegration of a utopian, wild and controversial dream - a family commune in the heart of a beautiful Brazilian forest. A wonderfully shot film, edited and directed with great talent, that never ceases to surprise, excite and illuminate questions of personal and communal Jewish identity while touching fascinating universal issues of family relations, patriarchy in the modern world, tension between nature and progress and a wide range of individualistic and existentialist worldviews.
  Jury's Reasoning for Award, Haifa International Film Festival, 2020
• The edit was focused and kept the narrative on track with a clear structure, despite the difficulty of many smaller storylines that developed throughout the film. The story turned on itself, which is a clever structure for creating tension and momentum in the story. The interweaving of the multiple storylines worked very well and were put to good use in order to create new insights, contradictions and thus tension. The editor searched and found imagery of quiet moments, subtle eye-movements and other small details that another editor perhaps would've overseen. Yet this editor put it to good use in order to construct the story. That, to me, is what editing is about.
  Jury's Reasoning for Award, Salem International Film Festival, 2021