Having won Camera d’Or and Screenwriting honors at Cannes, Jellyfish/Meduzot appears at Lincoln Center-MoMA’s thirty-seventh “the films of today, the talk of tomorrow” New Directors/New Films coincident with its theatrical release. A first-time feature from bestselling Tel Aviv author Etgar Keret, written by his co-director and life partner Shira Geffen, its seventy-eight minutes are dense and resonant, a weave of stories related by theme, plot and beachfront location.

The Mediterranean shore serving as liberation from the omnipresent belligerent, social and racial pressure cooker of the nation, and the Hebrew dialogue full of subtitle-untranslatable cultural nuances, the three tales touch lightly enough to be credible aside from contrived windups. Concerning relationships and the need for communication, family pasts and presents from the standpoint of females -- the short that precedes it, Daniel Robin’s my olympic summer, uses more super-8 home movie footage for the male take -- with a mix of pathos, humor, longing and love Jellyfish comments on human interactions that do not stop at borders.

At Keren (Noa Knoller) and Michael’s (Gera Sandler) wedding party, from an incorrectly buttoned blouse to spilled hors d’oeuvres, caterer’s waitress Batya (Sarah Adler) gets nothing right, while photographer Tamar (Tsipor Aizen) messes up too in her field. When the bride fractures an ankle climbing from a locked bathroom, the Caribbean honeymoon has to be canceled, so the newlyweds wind up on the noisy first floor of a standard beach hotel, then on an equally unsatisfactory higher floor with the elevator out of service, and finally in an upper suite donated by an attractive thirty-something “poetess” there for reasons beyond writing like Dostoyevsky.

Tamar has a motorbike and okay flat piled with still photos and unwatched childhood home movies. Batya lives in a peeling place whose landlord raises rent but does not fix leaky ceilings or balky faucets, and she bites her tongue with her stylish divorced mother Nili (Miri Fabian), a self-centered career woman and fundraiser.

The young women’s is by choice. Far down the pecking order is inaptly named Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre), an English-and-Tagalog-speaking Filipina caregiver unlucky in job assignments, who pines for five-year-old son Binos back home but does not have money for a real phone call or a Playmobil ship for his birthday. Following the first-day death of one elderly charge, she is hired by artsy theater-struck Galia (Ilanit Ben-Yaakov) to pick up from the hospital and care for her gruff German-Hebrew-speaking mother Malka (Zharira Charifai), who wants no help.

These lives bump into one another casually, unknowingly -- a bicycle upsets a pedestrian -- or more deeply when, her apartment flooded, fired Batya beds down at fired Tamar’s or, his edgy wife jealous of the generous suite-dweller, Michael sloshes through rain-inundated streets in his undershirt. The foreign element to these lives is the speechless little girl from the sea (Nikol Leidman) who attaches herself to Batya on a morning beach. Orange-haired, blue-eyed, freckled, in the bottom of a two-piecer and a red-and-white tube floater, she is real -- others see, even photograph, the child -- and at the same time not real, a metaphor for childhood, loss, love. Kindly police Sergeant Antebi (Tzahi Grad) makes paper boats from missing person files and points out that no one concerns himself with unidentified strays and unmourned deceased.

But Batya does. She retrieves her own moldy girl dresses from the father who has had no contact with her for years (Assi Dayan, as Eldad) and has on his hands the bulimic younger woman he has fattened up who now wants to marry him. Batya looks for the lost girl when, after realistically picking at a wedding cake, she disappears. The search will leave the ex-waitress with a concussion and literally at sea, under it in fact, to suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.

While this thread unfolds, in the hotel the newlyweds quarrel, to learn about themselves and life through death, and come together on a wiser, sadder, stronger basis, just as Joy’s tears lead to uniting her and her charge Malka as mother-daughter-friends observed from outside by sterile birth-daughter Galia.

Reminiscent of O. Henry, the tales cross and go their independent ways. Together, they do not add up to your usual picture of neurotic loneliness in the impersonal modern metropolis. There is a feeling for a culture but yet the concrete (in both senses) bustle of Tel Aviv is not a major player. Connectedness, or love, may be friendship or mother-daughter or husband-wife (with its promise of parent-child) and comes in unexpected packages. 

(Released by Zeitgeist; not rated by MPAA.)