Natalie Portman’s directorial debut is a stunning and heartfelt adaptation of Amos Oz’s autobiographical best-selling memoir. In sticking with its source material, the film details Oz’s childhood set against the backdrop of the end of the British Mandate for Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel. Portman casts herself as Oz’s mother, Fania, a woman so stifled in her marriage and by the tense, highly politicized terrain of 1940s Palestine that she begins to lose herself in imagined adventures. Oz (played by newcomer Amir Tessler) experiences the founding of Israel admist his mother’s dwindling health and must reconcile his own coming of age with that of his homeland. A film that seamlessly blends the political and the intimate, Portman’s first feature is not to be missed.