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Millions watch hours in the lives of people like the Osbournes and Paris Hilton on TV, so why not share 330 minutes with someone who’s actually interesting? David Perlov, who died in December 2003, at the age of 73, was one of Israel’s greatest documentary filmmakers. As often happens with such visionary and non-compromising artists, he found himself unemployed back in 1973, and so he decided to "start from the beginning," recording his own life in all its uncontrived minutiae starting with a simple shot from the window of his Tel Aviv apartment. His project recalls the enthusiasm of the neophyte filmmaker in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Camera Buff, but Perlov, as he states repeatedly throughout this six-part chronicle, is determined to record life without artistic or ideological artifice, without "plot or story or drama."

But drama, of course, interrupts the litany of strangers, friends (they include such luminaries as Klaus Kinski, Irving Howe, Claude Lanzmann, and Isaac Stern), and sunsets backed by Perlov’s gruff and gnomic commentary. The drama ranges from the romantic traumas of his talented twin daughters to the wars and the political turmoil of his homeland. The Yom Kippur War descends with a bewildering shock, but the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, labeled the "Campaign for Peace in Galilee," fills him with the kind of knowing cynicism familiar to many Americans today as they contemplate their country’s foreign policy. Perlov’s observations on the failure of the Israeli media ring just as true now, and the then Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, defying calls for his resignation after massacres in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camp, could give today’s politicians a lesson in chutzpah.

In the end, Perlov can’t avoid the plot of his own personal history, or the plot of his mother’s grave, which he visits in a trip to his native Brazil in the final episode. For those deluded by daily fixes of reality TV, this epic of the everyday could be therapeutic. In Hebrew with English subtitles. (black-and-white and color/330 minutes)