Over My Dad's Body

Israeli filmmaker Taliya Finkel helmed this strange personal documentary exploring the difficult-to-define boundary between sanity and madness, focusing on a bizarre feud that tore her family apart. Finkel's father, Shmuel, who was born in the Ukraine and emigrated to Israel in 1973, passed away in 2001 after years of poor health. Diagnosed as being schizophrenic, he nevertheless insisted for years that the man who claimed to be his brother, Sterik, was actually a KGB agent (the fact that Sterik refused Shmuel's demand to take a DNA test only added to the confusion). Accompanied by an Israeli private investigator, Finkel tries—unsuccessfully—to uncover evidence in Israel that her uncle is a spy, followed by an equally fruitless trip to Ukraine to attempt to confirm her dad's insistence that his real sibling died in a Ukrainian prison and was replaced by a look-alike imposter. Over My Dad's Body goes out of its way to give Shmuel the benefit of a doubt, even though there's ample evidence that he was an obstreperous man with a frayed grip on reality (a great deal of footage shows Finkel's parents arguing about Shmuel's bad manners—the couple divorced, but Shmuel would visit several times a day seeking food and money). The enigmatic Sterik refused to participate in the making of this film—his face is digitally obscured—so it's hard to imagine how he felt, being at the center of this fairly weird endeavor. Optional. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)