Jonathan Sagall

La sombra de Momo

Jonathan Sagall was born in Toronto in 1959, but his face became part of the collective memory from a room in Tel Aviv. At eleven, he moved to Israel with his family, and there he began building an identity that has always swung between provocation and reticence.

In 1978 the phenomenon of Eskimo Limon arrived. Sagall played Momo, the attractive and somewhat distant young member of the group, a character who brought him fame that was as massive as it was suffocating for almost a decade. That saga of teen sex comedies fueled the Israeli film industry financially, but for him it became a label that was hard to shake.

And he pulled it off through sheer silence.

Sagall never wanted to be just the heartthrob of late-1970s teen magazines. So he began looking for projects that would shatter that disposable pin-up image. In 1983, he took part in Drifting, one of the first Israeli films to openly address homosexuality, which led to a head-on clash with his usual audience.

A Refuge Behind the Camera

Steven Spielberg called him in 1993 to take part in Schindler's List. He played Poldek Pfefferberg, and that experience on the Kraków set helped him realize his place was behind the camera as well. Before the decade was out, he had already decided he didn't want to depend on other people's calls.

In 1998 he presented his first feature film as a director, titled Urban Feel. The film competed at the Berlin Film Festival and showed a sensibility far removed from the crude gags of his early professional work. He is an auteur who prefers absolute control over the screenplay and mise-en-scène to large international productions.

The industry sees him as a lone wolf.

Thirteen years passed before he premiered Lipstikka in 2011, a psychological drama about memory and trauma in Jerusalem. The film returned to the official selection at the Berlinale and confirmed that his cinema isn't interested in pleasing anyone. His output is slow, though, because Sagall prioritizes writing and his private life in cities like London and Berlin.

In 2017, he appeared in the British TV series The State, playing a supporting character full of tension. It was one of his most talked-about appearances on the European circuit in recent years.

He is based in Berlin.

He still keeps a low profile and avoids interviews that aren't entirely about the narrative structure of his scripts. In 2021, he collaborated on developing screenplays for independent projects in Central Europe. His contract with the original studio behind the Eskimo Limon saga formally expired decades ago, and he has no contact with the commercial nostalgia circuit.