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

 

 

Seven Blessings by Ayelet Menachemi wins big prizes

Sheva Brachot or Seven Blessings, an award-winning film, directed by Ayelet Menachemi, is about complicated family relationships. The film was the big winner of the Israeli Ophir Awards this year – winning for best director, best film, and best actress (Raymonde Amsallem who also starred in The Future this year).  

It is a film about joy, eating, and drinking, all around a family simcha.  But also, behind the façade of the joy, lies a story of jealousies, resentment and family secrets. This is a comedy/drama, a stupendous Moroccan family story that takes place in 1990s Israel.

The main character, Marie, lives in Paris, and comes with her fiancé to Israel to celebrate her wedding with her family members all present.  The film opens with the wedding and the first thing we see is that, when the rabbi calls for the bride’s mother, two mothers hold hands to help her lift her veil and drink the wine. And thus begins a story of two sisters, one who was childless, and one who was blessed with many children. Back in Morocco, the sister with many children gave away one of her children to her childless sister.  The child who was given away was Marie.  She was brought up in a dour household, as against the boisterous household of her parents and her siblings.  And she has many resentments until this day.

As we go from celebration to celebration, marking all the nights of the week following the wedding, we meet all of Marie’s siblings, each with their own problems.  One drinks too much.  One is having fertility treatments.  One is falling out of love with her taxi-driver husband.  I loved the scenes in which everyone talked over everyone else and the way the members of the family so easily moved between speaking Moroccan Arabic, French and Hebrew.

The filmmaker, Ayelet Menachemi, also made Noodle (previously reviewed on this blog), one of my favorite Israeli feature films, also about a strong woman character.