Saint Clara

Running time: 84 mins

It's 1999 and the Golda Meir School is a time bomb of teen unrest. But will the revolution be led by long-haired Eddie Tikel and his shaven-headed pal "Rosy" Rosenthal, or will the school's plotting principal orchestrate the forces of nature into a counter-rebellion? And what part will Clara, a clairvoyant Russian girl with "amazing eyes," play in their plans? The trouble begins when the entire class receive perfect scores on their math exams. The only student capable of such a feat is Eleanor, a math whiz who older boys (and men) find strangely attractive. But in order to give the answers to everyone, she would have had to know in advance which of the one thousand problems would be on the test. And so a surprise test is devised in which the problems will be randomly drawn from a bag. Clara uses her new-found psychic ability to see which problems will be chosen, and Eleanor quickly calculates the answers for everybody. In the resulting administrative chaos, Rosy the firebug sees the opportunity for a revolution; but he also sees Tikel's attraction to Clara and begins to suspect his friend of being a double-agent for the principal. At times Saint Clara is reminiscent of Repo Man in tone and aesthetic sensibility, yet it forgoes that film's irony and achieves instead a magical realism in which love may yet conquer all. Saint Clara is this year's Academy Award submission from Israel and marks the feature directorial debut of Ori Sivan and Ari Fulman. --Rod Myers