A New Film about Breast Feeding opens at the Jerusalem Film Festival

The Milky Way, directed by Maya Kenig, is a quirky parable about young mothers and how they relate to being chained down by breast feeding.

 Tala is a single woman, an offbeat singer who has just given birth to a baby girl. She lives with her mother, who is trying to help out.  Tala finds work at a factory where dozens of young mothers are pumping breast milk for sale.  This place is a big business, with pumping stations, a bottling plant with an enormous conveyor belt carrying the bottles filled with breast milk, and even a fleet of delivery trucks.

Through a series of charming incidents, Tala meets Nili who is a client and whose baby is thriving on Tala’s breast milk.  Tala learns a lot from Nili’s lonely lifestyle, and it helps her to appreciate and understand her own relationships – with her mother, with her baby daughter, and even with the father of her baby. 

Although a bit strange, this film, which is about motherhood, about connecting to your baby, and about the difficulties of being a single mom, includes great acting, a super script, and tremendous charm.  The film is filled with humor but also angst and pathos.

Filmmaker Maya Kenig is known for her previous films, the quirky Off-white Lies, starring her husband Gur Bentwich, and the charming Bentwich Syndrome, co-directed with her husband, both of which have been reviewed previously on this blog.