All Moms Lie, a new sports dramedy from KAN, airs on Sunday and Thursday nights on KAN 11 and is also available on kan.org.il. It’s a rare case where the series is better than the promos would have you believe. Inspired by the international Mamanet sports league for mothers of all fitness levels, the film was directed and co-created by Atara Frish, who also made Dismissed, the female army officer comedy.
From the ads, All Mothers Lie looks like it’s going to be a typical lovable underdog sports team comedy, and it is that, but it’s also a touching story about Eli (Maya Maron), the depressed single mother of a teenage son in Jaffa. They both spend all their free time sitting on the couch watching TV or playing video games. But she is galvanized to make a much-needed change in their lives when her son’s teacher tells her that in his essay about what he wants to do when he grows up, he wrote that he would like to be disabled.
As she pushes him to join the rest of his classmates for a movie night, he challenges her to join a women’s catchball team (a variation of volleyball) that meets in the same building. She wants to say no, but can’t, and the team desperately needs her because one of their players has just left, leaving them short on members for a game.
The rest of the players are a familiar motley crew, led by the relentlessly positive Dina (Agam Rodberg), a researcher, and the team includes perhaps one woman too many, whose most identifiable characteristic is tactlessness.
Among the players are Bat-el (Bat-el Moseri), a loud meter maid who is cheating on her husband with the referee; Sabrin (Rebecca Esmeralda Telhami), an Arab Israeli and married mother of three who is surprised to learn that she is pregnant again; and Yana (Diana Golbi), a lesbian who isn’t one for hiding her emotions. But the big surprise when Eli joins the team is that Yigal (Tsahi Halevi), an ex-boyfriend she hasn’t seen in years, is coaching an opposing team.
While it’s predictable that Eli soon begins to blossom, it’s so nice to see Maya Maron on screen again that you can forgive any flaws in the script. She became one of Israel’s most interesting actresses when she starred in the 2002 film Broken Wings. While she has appeared in the film Campfire and in two popular series, Shtisel and BeTipul, she has had few roles in the past decade. Maron has that talent for making you instantly care about any character she plays, and from the first scene, I was rooting for her; she makes Eli’s journey touching and worth watching.
The Winter Olympics are just about to start, and you can watch them on various sports channels on Hot and Yes, as well as on HBO Max. If you want to get deeper into that Winter Olympics mood, you can check out Finding Her Edge on Netflix, a new series about three Canadian sisters who are competitive skaters. This is a soapy drama that plays like The Summer I Turned Pretty crossed with a nighttime soap like Dynasty, set in and around an ice-skating rink run by the extremely photogenic Russo family.
The parents were world-class figure skaters until the mother passed away, and now the father (Harmon Walsh) runs the rink and trains skaters who live in his beautiful home in a picturesque, snowy Canadian town, helped by his dutiful middle daughter, Adriana (Madelyn Keys). Adriana is a once-promising ice dancer who gave up her career to run the family business. Her blond, mean-girl older sister, Elise (Alexandra Beaton), takes all the glory for herself and her solo career.
Sparks fly when Adriana’s former partner and boyfriend, Freddie (Olly Atkins), comes to train at the rink with a new girl, and there’s also a gorgeous bad-boy ice-dancing champ, Braden (Cale Ambrozic), around to complicate her life.
While there could be more skating in the series, there is still enough to please fans of the sport, who can always fast-forward to the skating scenes.
The script seems as if the writer were paid by the cliché, which is the case with almost all ice-skating dramas. The biggest issues are the romances and the rivalry between figure skaters and ice dancers. If that sounds like ridiculous fun, you’ll definitely want to tune in, and it may take your mind off everything but the Olympics.
Netflix docu
Netflix is also offering a new documentary, Miracle: The Boys of ’80, about the US ice hockey team’s surprising Olympic win over the Soviets. Disney+ features the movie, Cool Runnings, a 1993 comedy based on the true story of the Jamaican bobsled team who competed in the 1988 Olympics, and it’s especially relevant this year, because for the first time, Israel has a bobsled team that will compete in the Olympics.
APPLE TV+ offers the crown jewel of corny ice-skating movies, Ice Castles, about a figure skater who loses her sight, both the original 1978 film and the lamer 2010 remake. Apple TV+ also has Blades of Glory, the comedy about two male rival skaters – played by Will Ferrell and Jon Heder – who find a way to skate with each other after they are banned from competing separately.
Shameful history doc
The scandal of how over 1,000 babies and toddlers, about half of whom were of Yemenite origin, went missing from transit camps for new immigrants in the late 1940s and early ’50s is one of the most shameful chapters in Israeli history, and despite many investigations, there is still much that is not known about it.  A new documentary, Looking for Yadida by Israela Shaer-Meoded, scheduled to be shown on KAN 11 on February 7 and available on kan.org.il, tells the story of one family’s attempt to find closure for their loss.
Shaer-Meoded, who won the Diamond Award for Best Director of a Documentary at the 2025 Jerusalem Film Festival, has made a moving and effective film that combines testimony from various commissions of inquiry with the director’s search for the truth about what happened to her aunt, who was taken to a hospital in Israel when she was an infant just after her parents landed in Israel on one of the flights from Yemen in 1949. Her family was told that she died in the hospital a few weeks later, but they were never shown a body, nor were they told where she was buried. Their story is heartbreakingly similar to many others.
The director convinced a detective who had investigated many such cases to look into this one, but even with all his experience, he was unable to come up with an answer. The search itself is the story as it becomes clear that there was a pattern of sloppiness in record keeping and a fundamental disrespect on the part of the authorities for the supposedly primitive immigrant families.
One official publicly states that these people did not really care if they lost a child because they had so many. Some claimed that, since, in certain cases, the families did not visit these infants while they were in the hospital, this was proof that they did not care for them. They ignored the fact that those immigrants had no money and were often in camps in areas with no public transportation.
Many of the children died and were buried in unmarked graves, possibly in mass graves, and there is evidence that others may have been adopted without the consent of their parents. But the accomplishment of this film is narrowing its focus to one baby girl and her family, which makes it all the more affecting.