Filming Someone You Love: A Q&A After My Sister Shira at the Jewish Film Festival Berlin Brandenburg
By Matan Tal
A conversation after the screening, May 6, 2026
There's a particular kind of attention you get in a room full of strangers who have just watched something intimate about your family. The Jewish Film Festival Berlin Brandenburg gave me that room on May 6, 2026. What followed was a conversation about time, distance, and what it actually means to point a camera at someone you love.
You dug up material you shot when you were a teenager. Did you plan on making a documentary back then?
At 17, I didn't plan anything. I saw an opportunity. Shira was about to have surgery on her face — there was going to be a before and after, a different person on the other side of it — and I understood that it was now or never. So I took a camera from my high school film class without asking, went to the hospital, and started filming.
Then it got intense. I stopped. I had material, I had a story, but I knew it wasn't complete. Something was missing and I couldn't name what.
In 2023 it dawned on me that maybe now was the time. Fifteen years later. I finished it fifteen years after I started it.
Why 2023? Why that moment in your life?
Distance. Living in Berlin, away from Israel, away from Shira, away from the life I had back then — I had a different perspective. I wasn't completely inside the story anymore. I could be both things at once: the brother who lived it, and the filmmaker who could finish it. That combination wasn't available to me at 17.
And I wanted to make something that wasn't just particular to our story. Something larger. That required standing somewhere outside it, even slightly.
This is an essay film. Why that form, and why for this film specifically?
Essay film is a subgenre of documentary that doesn't pretend to be objective. The truth comes from within — the subjectivity itself is the story. The interpretation is the reality.
For My Sister Shira, any other approach would have been dishonest. A conventional documentary would have turned Shira into a representative of Williams Syndrome — a medical subject, an object of study. Boring, and wrong. I'm her brother. I grew up with her. I didn't even know she had a syndrome until I was nine or ten. She was just Shira.
That position — brother of someone with Williams Syndrome, someone who saw her first as a person and only later as a particular kind of person — is rare. It felt irresponsible not to use it.
You're showing very personal material to a room full of strangers. Is that hard?
No. It's a story. It's a piece of art. It exists on its own.
What you see on screen are characters — moments in people's lives, frozen in time, fifteen years ago. My mother in this film is my mother in a particular moment, facing a particular challenge. That's not her now. And even the film itself is fixed in time — if I had finished it yesterday it would have been slightly different.
Whether people like the characters or the story is their business.
You wrote that this film forced you to ask what it means to film someone you love. What does it mean?
It means you're knee-deep in the mud of the story. You have emotions about your subject. You're closer than you should be, by conventional filmmaking standards.
It's harder. And it's worth it.
Film someone you love. Show the connection. Show the truth about the relationship. That's the only advice I have.
My Sister Shira screened as part of the Dagesh Werkstatt programme at the Jewish Film Festival Berlin Brandenburg, Berlin, May 6, 2026.
