Keep your eye on new filmmaker Nir Bergman. To date, his first feature film, Broken Wings, has earned nine Israeli Academy Awards as well as honors at film festivals in Toronto, Berlin and Tokyo. Catching him on the phone during a Denver press tour for his realistic movie about an Israeli family grieving over the death of the father, I offered congratulations for all those awards. "It's tougher to meet the expectations of my mother," he replied -- and I don't think he was joking. Bergman's relationship with his mom clearly provided dramatic material for some key scenes in Broken Wings.

"After my parents divorced, I lived with my mom," Bergman explains. When he was 10 years old, his family moved from Israel to San Diego in 1978 and lived there for a whole year. The divorce happened three months later. "I remember my mom and me pushing a car that wouldn't start and it was raining." That particular memory became one of the poignant sequences in his film -- but it features mother and daughter instead of mother and son.  And, like the rest of Bergman's film, what was happening on screen seemed more real than fiction.

How did Bergman manage to write and direct a movie of such unflinching realism? Besides drawing on his own experiences as a member of a family facing problems after the parents split up, he was inspired by an American movie. "I watched Ordinary People so many times I knew the dialogue by heart," he says, referring to his teenage years. "People couldn't even watch it with me. When I became a filmmaker I wanted to touch people and try to make the characters in my movie real people on the screen, just like in Ordinary People."

Bergman admits he sometimes argued with cast members about this. "The beautiful actress who played the mother wanted to be glamorous, but I said you can't wear make-up when you come out of the bathroom. She challenged me about her character, a woman who wants a new life but who is in constant conflict. It was a real give-and-take." 

What made Bergman decide to become a filmmaker? "It wasn't a decision," he insists. "I was 22 when my sister came back from San Francisco with her rock band and she wanted to make a video clip. I became aware of the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem. I wasn't accepted, so I attended the University of Tel Aviv for one year, and it was like falling in love. Finally, I was accepted at the Sam Spiegel  School."

When asked to describe the most important thing he wants people to know about Broken Wings, Bergman answers, "My greatest experience is when someone in the audience says, 'Listen, I took my dad to see your film; I took my mother to see your film; I took my sister to see your film,' because it's about the gap between generations and about how the way to each other is by realizing we love each other so dearly." 

That kind of realism works for me.