Smadar Shir

Mommy, Smile! Smadar Shir

There were no warning signs. Springtime in Israel, the day after the Passover Seder, a kibbutz guesthouse, sunny and peaceful. Maya, a couple's therapist who researches the secrets of memory, didn't want to spend the Passover holiday there. She knew that place was like an open wound for her mother, but the pastoral landscape did her good, and she's enjoying herself with her husband and three children, at the beach.

When her middle son waves a camera he got as a gift from his grandmother, for finding the Passover Afikomen, and cries out to her, "Mommy, smile!", Maya suddenly feels a stab. She turns her back and walks toward their room.

The first hour she was gone, her husband assumes that she went to bring their little one a pacifier, or maybe she got lost.

"Mommy will be right back," he promises their three children and his child from a previous marriage, who isn't so worried about Maya's disappearance. By noon, there are whispers in the dining room that one of the guests has gone missing. The kibbutz security officers start to investigate and fears escalate. Was she kidnapped? Was it suicide? Why would she do such a thing? She's a woman who has everything - a husband, three children, and a career helping people. Why does her husband refuse to involve the police?

The "happy family's" dark secrets are exposed during the search. Different assumptions about Maya reveal sides of her that others were not aware of. Relationships are put under a microscope, and the term "happy woman" is broken down and rebuilt as Maya drifts back in time, to the Yom Kippur War during which the father she never knew was killed. The man who didn't want her. The man who said to her mother, "Everything will be fine, just smile."