Three More Feature Films from the Jerusalem Film Festival repertoire

I just want to mention three more Israeli features that I saw last week at the Jerusalem Film Festival --

Mama, directed by Or Sinai, is a film about the loneliness of a Polish woman, working in Israel. Mila (beautifully portrayed by Evgenia Dodina) is employed as a housekeeper/chef for a wealthy family. Her loneliness has driven her into the embrace of the family’s African gardener.  When cleaning the ceiling fans, Mila falls off the ladder and breaks her arm.  This leads her to a well-needed vacation back home in Poland, where she rediscovers her husband who is having an affair, her daughter is pregnant, and her home is crumbling.  Mila has to decide where she belongs.

Mama is available from Intramovies geremia@intramovies.com

Cuz You’re Ugly, directed by Sharon Engelhart, is a film about a young woman soldier, her problems with her own self-image and her relationship with her teenage sister. Although the film contains too much vulgarity and is lacking in depth of character, it tries to evoke pathos and empathy by providing an intimate look at the two sisters. One sister is obsessed with obtaining an abortion and the other with getting laid.

Avigail is a soldier in the IDF. She is very overweight and she seems to have a chip on her shoulder. The external face that she shows everyone around her is a bit wild with a short fuse. Her army commander, although with some misgivings, has offered her to go to officer training and she is proud of that. When she goes home to Jerusalem for the weekend, we meet her 15-year-old sister, Naomi, and her dysfunctional mother.  As soon as she learns that Naomi is pregnant, Avigail gets right on the case, trying to figure out how to take care of the problem.

Avigail is still a virgin and she wants to change that.  Not until she meets a boy who, in an intimate moment, tells her that she’s beautiful, do we realize how important it is for her to have someone appreciate her for who she is.

Cuz You’re Ugly is available from the producer, Galit Cahlon, galia13@gmail.com

Houses is a debut film by Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum.

Sasha came to Israel as a child, during the immigration from the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s.  He decides to return to Tsfat, to the houses that his family lived in, in order to revisit his childhood, collect memories, and come to terms with past traumas.  At the premiere screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival, the filmmaker said, “This film is a journey into the past so that the present will appear to be more possible.”

This is a minimalist film, mostly in B&W, with color used only for the childhood memories which show Sasha as a little girl.  Today, Sasha prefers to be referred to as “he” and still corrects his mother when she insists on calling him “you” in the feminine.  “After all, I was there when you were born,” his mother says.

Houses is a film about loneliness, about relations with his mother, about wanting to shed the memories of childhood. The film is available from Marker Films, festivals@markerfilms.com