Saint Clara

One of the most popular Israeli films of the 1990s, Saint Clara presents a jumpy, highly energetic, lively, off-kilter Israel where love and the apocalypse seem interconnected. Beautiful Lucy Dubinchik stars as Clara, a Russian immigrant teenager whose clairvoyant powers create mayhem among the students at Golda Meir Junior High School. When the entire seventh grade class gets perfect scores on a math exam, the faculty is thrown into a crisis. Determined to stamp out this challenge to their authority, the teachers trace the source to Clara. Soon, Clara's powers disrupt the whole town as she picks winning lottery numbers and predicts and earthquake. Clara's powers may not last, however... Hardly your typical teenage comedy, Saint Clara, directed by Ari Folman and Ori Sivan, from a novel by Czech dissident Pavel Kohout, has been called a cross between David Lynch and John Hughes. It is a rich example of the original talent thriving in Israeli cinema.