Seaweed begins with a young boy listening repeatedly to a voicemail message.
It soon becomes evident that this is the only recording the boy has access to of his mother’s voice, so he re-dials her number and listens again. Understandably, the boy misses his recently deceased mother and finds the thought of letting the final vestiges of her fade away too much to bear. Liel Simon’s short takes the framework and aspects of the coming-of-age film but channels them into a piece concerned with grief and acceptance. This handsomely mounted drama is about the process of mourning and what it means to remember.
These lessons are imparted by a wanderer who is navigating his own sorrow. The boy follows his father into town with the express purpose of liberating a box of his mother’s belongings from a thrift store. While doing so, he drops her favourite hat, and it is purchased by the stranger, who watched the heist take place. The boy follows him to his outdoor dwelling in the desert, and the two strike up an unlikely rapport, seemingly informed by a loss that colours the wanderer’s own life.
The desert acts as more than merely a backdrop to their burgeoning friendship, instead becoming something of an allegorical lesson through which the man can help the boy process the impacts of his sorrow. The film channels the deep history of the South Israeli desert, and its early days submerged at the bottom of a great ocean, to reflect on the way that the past shapes the present. The grandeur of the rugged landscape is attributed to the effects of the sea, and this residual link provides a chord with which those who have come before can still be tethered to us. Through their brief association, the man gives the boy an invaluable tool to remain connected to his mother on a level far beyond clinging to a battered box of belongings.
Director, screenplay, editing: Liel Simon
Cast: Gilad Gregori Oks, Yehuda Nahari Halevi, Zeev Ariel
Producer: Tamir Gal
Cinematography: Yossi Olech
Costume & set design: Olga Podster
Music: Adam Weingrod
Sound: Keren Or Briton
Production companies: Liel Simon / Ranshlink LTD (Israel), DFFB (Germany)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival In Hebrew
22 minutes