EXCLUSIVE: Israeli director Ruthy Pribar returns to the Tribeca Film Festival with second film What is to Come next week and Deadline can reveal a first clip.

Ronit Yudkevitch stars as Yehudit, a sheltered farmer’s wife who backs out of a suicide pact that leaves her husband dead. She flees the shame and hidden debts that destroyed their life together for the resort city of Eilat.

An unexpected bond with migrants, refugees, and a compassionate hotel manager helps her rebuild herself from nothing and discover a life beyond the one she was told to live.

Pribar enjoyed a buzzy Tribeca debut in 2020 with first film Asia albeit vicariously with that edition pivoting online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

She won the festival’s Nora Ephron Prize, celebrating a female director or writer whose work in the festival shares the same spirit as its late namesake filmmaker, while its star Shira Haas won best actress and Daniella Nowitz, best cinematography. The film went on to represent Israel in the Oscars.

“Returning with my second feature carries enormous meaning for me. In 2020, the film’s journey went far beyond anything I could have imagined; I experienced it entirely from afar. To finally share a film with audiences in person at Tribeca feels incredibly emotional and deeply full circle,” said Pribar.

The director reveals that inspiration for the film came from a real-life encounter.

“A few years ago, I met a woman who changed me. We had only just met when she asked if I could drive her to her husband’s grave. She had no car, the cemetery was far from any bus line, and there was something about the trust behind the request that stayed with me. Standing beside his headstone in the brutal August heat, she told me her story,” she explained.

“Buried beneath crushing debt and despair, she and her husband had made a plan to end their lives together. At the last moment, she chose to live. What moved me most was not only what she had survived, but the way she spoke about it. Alongside the grief and shame was an unexpected sense of gratitude, even wonder, at the possibility of beginning again. That encounter became the emotional foundation of What is to Come.”

The feature reunites Pribar with Asia cinematographer Nowitz as well as producers Yoav Roeh and Aurit Zamir and Dana Høegh under the banner of Gum Films.