by Ashley Cohen for Winter Film Festival
Israeli dark comedy Tom’s Second Suicide is an official selection of New York City’s 14th Annual Winter Film Festival.
For a movie centered on wanting to die, Tom’s Second Suicide has a surprising amount of heart and humor. Tom has decided that today will be the day she ends her life, but she didn’t plan it well.
When her brother’s car breaks down, she resigns herself to go on a roadtrip in search of the ‘best’ place to commit suicide. It may not sound like a comedy, but writer Karni Haneman finds that life is, “a constant balance between being very dramatic and depressing, to being very absurd in general.” She wrote the script without any initial filtering, including the humoristic thoughts that kept popping in her head.
This kind of story is risky since it is such a sensitive topic. The goal was to make a character-driven narrative, where they are not judged for their opinions or actions. Haneman did not want to mock the characters for their choices, she treated them all as three-dimensional complex individuals. She cites Hal Hartley‘s Trust and The Unbelievable Truth and Adrienne Shelley‘s Sudden Manhattan and I’ll Take You There as inspirations for her script’s language of blending dramatic circumstances with understated humor.
The balancing act of comedy and the serious subject matter continued when it came to bringing the script to life. Every actor brings their own interpretation to the roles they audition for.
The same line can sound either tragic, cynical, or funny depending on the pacing or vocal tone. The audition process to find an actress for ‘Tom’ took over a year. Producer Sivan Vardina eventually realized, “that in order for Tom to work, it has to be the “real” Tom, which is Karni.” Haneman is also an actor. She previously wrote, directed, and acted in her previous feature F*ck You Jessica Blair. But in that film there were many scenes and shots she wasn’t in, so she spent a good amount of time focusing behind the camera.
For Tom’s Second Suicide, Haneman knew she was going to direct, with the idea that someone else would be the main actress. Alongside cinematographer Naama Bunimovitz, she constructed the shot list where Tom was in nearly every frame of the film. Every successful film needs clear communication, even more so when the director is also the main actress. Collaboration is key, where everyone needs to understand “exactly what is needed in each and every moment and take,” Haneman explains. One example is having rehearsals with the lead actor, Adam Avidan helped establish the sweet spot for the pacing of the dialogue.
Like many classic road movies, there is a protagonist on a journey to a far destination, encountering other characters with different perspectives along the way. It somehow becomes less about the destination itself and more about how the protagonist interacts with the world around them. Taking inspiration from Wim Wenders films, Tom’s Second Suicide has a calming meditative quality to it. At times, the actors are as still as the beautiful landscape around them, as though the frame was a photograph instead of a moving picture. Haneman notes the slow pacing also brings the film “closer to the real-time of this sort of experience and adventure, but in a bit of a surrealistic way. And to emphasize the awkwardness of the situation…” At a time when many modern movies favor quick cuts and shaky camera movements, this deliberate restraint invites viewers to remain present with the characters.
Vardina describes the film as “above time…meaning that they can theoretically happen in any time and place, and keep their uniqueness over time.”
Besides universal themes, the film is also timeless in its creation of an original score. Haneman co-wrote the lyrics to the two original songs with her childhood best friend, Hilly Boimel. They created the in-universe band, “The Flacers” (named after Haneman’s cat, Flaca) where Boimel composed the soundtrack and Vardina sang the backing vocals. The songs are untethered to a specific time. They could theoretically be playing on the radio of any car driving down any wooded country road. The only place where a specific time period is mentioned is a scene where the characters discuss the end of the movie Fight Club.
Viewers unfamiliar with the ending may want to watch it beforehand, consider this the spoiler alert. Tom’s Second Suicide wrestles with mortality and the desire to take back to reclaim agency. The characters have many conversations veer towards how French philosophers might have discussed existentialism. There is no ‘right’ answer. The film does not prescribe a solution to mental health crises. Instead, audiences are invited to sit with the ethical quandaries of the film, reflecting on the gray areas of life, and maybe have the emotional release of laughter along the way.
About Winter Film Festival
Winter Film Festival is an all-volunteer women and minority-run organization as part of Winter Film Awards Inc, a 501(c)3 organization founded in 2011 to celebrate emerging talent in local and international filmmaking.
The 14th Annual Winter Film Festival runs February 18-22 2026 includes a diverse mixture of animated films, documentaries, comedies, romances, dramas, horror films, music videos and web series of all lengths. Our five-day event is jam-packed with screenings and Q&A sessions at NYC’s REGAL Union Square, six Education sessions/workshops and a variety of filmmaker networking events all coming to a glittering close on February 22 with our red-carpet gala Awards Ceremony.
Winter Film Festival programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Promotional support provided by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment.
For more information about Winter Film Festival, visit WinterFilmFest.org
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