IFF- Yona

Yona is based on the turbulent life story of Yona Wallach, one of the greatest poets to have written in the Hebrew language. The film focuses on a period when Wallach was not yet a household name, but a young woman from the countryside, orphaned by father, making her first steps in the realm of Hebrew poetry. The time is the early sixties and Wallach’s battle for recognition takes place in a chauvinistic, male-dominant environment of poets, which is already replete with generational bad blood. With her breakthrough and the inevitable transition from the countryside to the big city, Yona – who is immersed in testing her own limits and wants to experience everything – undergoes a mental breakdown. During those years, mental patients were treated with LSD in a way that did not help improve their condition, to say the least. Her struggle to resume writing and attain immortality in the canon of Hebrew poetry – the price she was willing to pay for that immortality – is the film’s main plotline.