New Film by Matan Yair - A Room of His Own

 A Room of His Own, directed and written by Matan Yair, premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival last night. It is a wonderful coming-of-age film about a teenager learning to handle the expectations of others and the difficulties of maturing.  This is Matan Yair’s third feature film.  His debut film was Scaffolding, an award-winning film which was reviewed on this blog.

Similar to Scaffolding, this film is also about a 17-year-old high school senior who has trouble understanding how to curb his impulsiveness and his enthusiasm for sharing what he is thinking, even if it is not terribly socially polite or correct. 

In A Room of His Own, Uri is an awkward and socially inept teenager, who has only one friend, and has a unique perspective on the world. Since his parents are going through a separation, his mother has moved into his bedroom.  They hug and share tender moments each night before going to sleep.  In his pre-army interview, Uri mentions that he shares a room with his mother, and suddenly he realizes that perhaps this is something that should have been kept secret.

The film touches on many subjects such as dealing with divorce, awakening sexuality, and how to handle his relationship with his sister who is in the army and only comes home on the weekends. Much of the film, however, is about Uri’s desire for a relationship with his disappearing and clueless father, and, on the other hand, his strong relationship with the sports teacher at his school.  It is also about the crude way that comments based on the Holocaust, on memory, on the terror of the Nazis, and about Goebbels and Goring, creep into his conversation.

According to the remarks by the filmmaker at the screening last night, this film has autobiographical details and is about “the period that my mother and my siblings tried to keep our heads above water.” His mother, weary and suffering from the separation from the father, is portrayed in a wonderful way, as a woman working hard to move ahead in her job, and as a loving figure to her son and her daughter.

This is not a film with a lot of action.  Rather, Matan Yair provides us with insight into the high school years which can be so difficult for young people. He is a talented filmmaker, with a subtlety and preciseness as he casts his gaze on a particuilar period or situation. 

The Death of Cinema and My Father Also

 I just had a chance to view The Death of Cinema and My Father Also, by Dani Rosenberg.  It is a quirky comedy-drama about a filmmaker and his relationship with his dying father.  This is not a regular feature film with a linear plot line.  Rather, it is an episodic and touching look at family issues -- grappling with the upcoming death of the father, aging, and divorce -- and it combines many different elements which are all put together in an arty and rather disjointed fashion. 

The different elements include: home movies by the filmmaker when he was young, short films made by the filmmaker using his own family, real footage of the dying father and also the rest of the family, and sequences which are dramatized after the father’s passing.

The film is a low-budget exercise, filled with touching and poignant scenes.  Rosenberg had originally received a grant from one of the film funds to make a film about Israel’s paranoia concerning the possibility of an all-out war with Iran.  This film was going to star his father, who had starred in many of his previous shorts.  When the father takes seriously ill, this story is scrapped, but Rosenberg is still interested in trying as hard as possible to document what he can from his father’s last few months.  He continues filming him, even when all the filmmaking is obviously distressing for the father. 

My favorite scene is when the filmmaker’s three-year-old son is participating in a dramatized scene in which the actor who is playing the dying father has a terrible case of shortness of breath.  The little boy says: grandpa wasn’t able to breathe.  The mother tells him: but you know that he’s not really your grandpa, he’s an actor.  The little boy responds: I know that but I felt bad for him because he couldn’t breathe!

This is a film which portrays cinema’s capacity for helping us remember and focus on those loved ones whom we have lost, helping us to commemorate their lives, and to try to move forward. 

Dani Rosenberg is a talented filmmaker.  When he was a film student at the Sam Spiegel Jerusalem Film School, he made a great film, The Red Toy (2004), about an Arab boy living in the Old City of Jerusalem, which made a big impression on me. 

The Death of Cinema and My Father Also (2020, 104 minutes) directed by Dani Rosenberg, is an Israel-France co-production.  

 

 

 

 

Issues of Family, Gender and the Workplace

Love Trilogy: Chained עיניים שלי  , directed by Yaron Shani (who co-directed the Oscar nominee, Ajami), is an award-winning psychogical profile of a man who loses his work, his status, and control over his own life.  

Rashi is a respected but tough-guy Tel Aviv cop, a man who knows how to defuse a difficult situation, and how to handle himself in tough spots.  His step-daughter is a rebellious 13-year-old, who has an uneasy relationship with her step-dad's strict demands. Rafi is a doting and loving husband as the couple is undergoing fertility treatments. We watch as his life unravels before our eyes. 

After a report of attempted drug sales in a park in Tel Aviv, Rashi and his partner shake down a group of teenage boys who are hanging out in the park.  As they are being searched, the kids are humiliated by the need to pull down their pants, and a few days later, two of the boys put in a complaint that they were sexually harassed by the police officer. With this wrongful accusation and the resulting suspension, Rashi’s life is thrown into disarray. The tragic ending is inevitable.

I think I prefer the hebrew title of the film  עיניים שלי  which means literally my eyes but is used in modern slang to mean my love. 

The other two films in this trilogy are Stripped and Reborn. 

As in the film Ajami, Shani works here with a cast of non-professional actors and uses improvisation to create the script, thus building an authentic and compelling feeling. Of course, there are disadvantages to using non-actors and improv – especially the fact that the look of the film is lacking in polish.  However, the overall effect is a good one and the resultant film is quite hard-hitting.

The film is produced by Black Sheep Film ProductionsLtd.  Take a look at the trailer.

Deadbeat Dads

Perhaps not surprisingly, divorce is on the rise in Israel, as is the phenomenon of fathers withholding child support payments. The documentary, Reinvestigation, directed by Anat Yuta Zuria and Shira Clara Winther, covers this issue from multiple perspectives. This is a tragic story within Israeli society and it must be faced head-on.  Here it is told in a compelling way.

Ella is a 28-year-old ultra-orthodox single woman who works as a private investigator.  The film tells the story of her involvement in a case about a father who refuses to pay child support and how this leads her into investigating the entire phenomenon within Israeli society.  She finds women who have suffered, and multiple young adults whose fathers didn’t pay and who are still resentful. One woman wants her father’s name removed from her identity card.  One young man wants to sue his father. These adults feel abandoned, both financially and emotionally.

Ella also discovers the movement for father’s rights and interviews some of the men, one of whom tells her that forcing a father to pay child support is just a way to ruin him financially. Some of these fathers have learned a trick – they demand joint custody so that they don’t have to pay support, but then they just don’t take responsibility for the joint custody. One mother, Yael, talks about the feeling of abandonment when she learns about the money that her ex is earning, but continuing to withhold payments for the children’s support.  In fact, she is sure that the children would be destroyed if they heard that their father had money. 

Is having children a risky business?  In a moment of genuine openness, Ella talks about her own personal life and she reveals that she has a fear of falling in love because she has seen in her work so much suffering and divorce, and is therefore convinced that getting married and having children can be a difficult enterprise.

Reinvestigation (documentary, 70 minutes) is available from Ruth Films.

A Disturbing Film about the Dysfunctional Family

Noble Savage, directed by Marco Carmel, and based on a novel by Dudu Busi, is a new Israeli feature film about a teenage boy living his life within the context of a tough reality in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Tel Aviv known as "Shechunat HaArgazim", "the neighborhood of boxes" where the inhabitants live in very poor and highly improvised physical conditions, with lots of crates and boxes in the back yard.

 Eli is an 11^th grade Jewish boy, who is grossly overweight, bullied by the other kids, and a loner.  In addition, he has a totally unstable family life, which is far from normative, even though his mother likes to try to imagine that it is at least somewhat "normative", which is hardly the case. He lives with his divorced mother and her lover, both of whom are recovering drug addicts, obsessed with trying to live a "mainstream" existence, which is actually impossible.  His father, who lives nearby in the same poverty neighborhood, is an alcoholic, an artist, and obsessed with the Holocaust, which complicates the family dynamics even more, and hampers him from relating in a meaningful way to his son, who reaches out to him over and over again throughout the film.

Eli works hard to try to reunite his divorced parents.  At the same time, he is trying to live a regular life, escaping the disastrous and dysfunctional reality that his parents have created for him.  He befriends an attractive new Russian girl in the neighborhood named Anna and together they try to cope with their lives, but Eli is drowning in the complexities and malfunctions of life that surround him, with which he tries to cope.  Throughout the film, Eli must cope with his mother’s fragility of being a recovering drug addict, the abusive nature of the mother’s lover, as well as the poverty, the vulgarity, the violence of this very tough neighborhood, where so many people lead meaningless and lonely lives.

Noble Savage is a hard-hitting film with excellent acting — both from young new actors and veteran stars such as Alon Aboutboul -- which offers a devastating look at what growing up in such surroundings can do to a young man and his severely challenged family.   

Divorce and the Haredi Community

Family Matters, directed by Noa Roth, is an intimate and fascinating documentary film that tells the story of the filmmaker's growing up, her family, how the family was ripped apart when her mother chose to take her children and leave her husband and haredi (ultra-orthodox) community behind.  Her mother, Yehudit Rotem, was a haredi woman, the mother of seven children, who today is a distinguished author.  

The mother is adamant not to appear together in the film with her ex-husband because of the difficult times that she endured at his hands.  For example, as a young mother she wanted to study and he literally burned her books.  She talks about her emotional and spiritual crisis.  She picked herself up, took her six daughters and moved to a smaller apartment, removing them from that world.  

Noa, on the other hand, although she has no intention of becoming haredi, says her mother ripped her children away from their father and their community.  Today, via the making of this film, Noa is trying to heal a deep wound that she feels still exists within her family.  Her mother and father have not spoken since the divorce, and her oldest sister, Tami, who was a teenager at the time of the divorce, doesn't speak to her father.  

This film provides an intimate glimpse into the tragedy of one family and also into the haredi world that the mother left behind.  It includes fragments from the mother's exquisite writings, using them as a mirror of that world. 

Family Matters (documentary, 66 minutes), won the Audience Award at DocAviv 2015, and is available from Go2Films.

Gett - The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

Gett - The Trial of Vivane Amsalem is directed by Ronit and Shlomi Alkabetz.  Produced as an extremely minimalist courtroom drama, this is a film that portrays a critical look at the patriarchal society, still alive and well , as seen within the Israeli rabbinical establishment.  In order to get a bill of divorce in Israel, a couple must apply to the rabbinical courts which hold authority in all areas dealing with personal status.  These rabbinical courts are run by ultra-orthodox rabbis, not always insensitive, but certainly limited in their world view.  The film shows how much the woman suffers in these courts which, according to Jewish law (halachah) give all the power to the man in granting a bill of divorce (gett).  In fact, in the film, the rabbinical court judges are portrayed as totally insensitive toward women, even to the point of emotional cruelty.

Ronit and Shlomi Alkabetz are a sister and brother team who have made a trilogy dealing with the Moroccan Jewish community in Israel -- already in Shiva(2008), we see that Viviane desperately wants a divorce from her cruel and manipulative husband.  In this new film, Gett, Viviane is fighting for her dignity as she petitions the court over a five-year period.  Although the couple has not lived together for many years, the court's first inclination is to insist that the wife return to the husband's household, even though he is obviously cold, cruel, domineering and manipulative towards her.   

This film, the third in the trilogy, adds another hard-hitting criticism.  Through the witnesses that it brings to the courtroom, the film expresses criticism against traditional Moroccan Jews who live a religious and old-fashioned  way of life, which is extremely restrictive for women. It portrays marriages without love and wives who are dominated by their traditional husbands. However, the film's criticism of this community is perhaps a bit too stereotypical.

The film was awarded first prize in the competition for best Israeli feature film at the Jerusalem Film Festival, just a few months ago.  Here are the jury remarks --

"Modern societies take for granted that one loves freely and stops loving freely. Yet, as the remarkable movie by Shlomi & Ronit Elkabetz suggests, that freedom is denied to women in modern Israel by the rabbinical tribunals.  If cinematographic tradition has made us used and even tired of seeing love as the sole and ultimate object of desire, Viviane Amsalem, the central character of this story desires  the opposite of love: she passionately desires a  Gett or the religious Jewish act of divorcing which can only be granted by a man to a woman. In a very convincingly and beautifully crafted script,  Vivianne desires to stop being the object of a man’s desire. But this passionate desire for stopping to be the object of desire of a man who will not set her free, meets with the resistance of powerful and invisible social machinery made of the various men who control her life and that of the women who appear in front of the tribunal court.  The movie represents a stunning twist on the genre of courtroom drama as it shows the subtle continuity between the court judges and the structure of the patriarchal family.  As the emotionally intense and restrained performance of Menashe Noy  [as the courtroom lawyer petitioning for the claimant] suggests, this powerful social machinery  is defeated not so much by the force of the better argument or by justice but by the relentless attack on a system determined to subdue the feelings and desires of women.  Shlomi & Ronit Elkabetz bring here to a conclusion their superb trilogy on the Israeli-Moroccan community, never romanticizing them, never yielding to any facile political reductionism. This is art at its best."

The film is available from Films Distribution.

Divorce, Deadbeat Dads and DVD's

Please look for my article on "agunot" on the Lilith Magazine website.

The article discusses the modern tragedy of women who are "chained" to their ex-husbands because they refuse to grant them a divorce. In this way, the men are in control and able to exact revenge at the same time.

This article discusses three films --

• the new American documentary film Women Unchained by Bev Siegel and Leta Lenik
• the Israeli short drama Get by Ayelet Menachemi (from the trilogy Tel Aviv Stories)
• the Israeli documentary Sentenced to Marriage by Anat Zuria.

While you are on the Lilith website, check out also their auction. You'll see a "coexistence" quilt that I made which is up for auction! "Coexistence" quilts, which can be seen on my quilting blog , include a central element of Bedouin embroidery made by women in Laqiya in the northern Negev, integrated into a traditional patchwork quilt.

Women and the Family

Students of film have created some remarkable and innovative dramatic films over the years. They are able to use the medium of film to explore forms of expression which far exceed what commercial filmmakers often permit themselves.Although the students at the religious film school in Jerusalem – the Ma'aleh School of Film and TV – are being trained to bring issues of the religious community to the screen, they are no different from other film school students in their flair for creativity and talent. A number of short dramas have been produced as graduate films by the students at Ma'aleh which have caught my attention.

I have put together here a group of 5 films on contemporary issues dealing with women and the family. All of these films are slice-of-life shorts, sensitive dramas about real people and real issues within the religious community. These short dramas can be rented or purchased from the Ma'aleh Film School.

Two films about the pressures of getting pregnant --
Expecting, directed by Meital Glazer,פרי בטן is about a young couple who can't get pregnant. The wife has a false pregnancy and they have to face the disappointment together.

New Year's Resolution, directed by Ayala Zamir,הרת עולם is about artificial insemination for a single woman in the haredi community. She is single, 38-years-old, and very badly wants to have a child. Her decision to try artificial insemination creates terrible tension with her mother who says that this is not the way to have a child.

Two Films about Divorce --
Separation, directed by Tsofnat David, הכל בסדר is about family disintegration from the point of view of a young girl. When her parents are fighting and threatening to separate, she makes up a story that her younger brother is missing, in order to bring the parents together.

Willingly, directed by Pazit Lichtman, הרי את is about a young couple who go to the rabbinate to obtain a divorce, even though they are not really sure of this decision.

Rape --
Cohen's Wife, directed by Nava Heifetz-Nussan, אשת כוהן is an artistic look at how Judaism deals with the rape of the wife of a "cohen"(descendant of the priestly class). With flexibility and compassion -- is the answer given in this film. The film tells the short story of an ultra-orthodox woman who has been raped by an intruder and no one can deal with her trauma.

Her husband, a "cohen", is not permitted by Jewish law to be married to a woman who has been taken by another man. Therefore, the woman's husband is unable to comfort his wife. Instead, he is occupied with his efforts in having the rabbinic court permit him to stay with her. Even though the rabbinic court finds a creative solution to the problem of this young couple thereby permitting them to remain together, it in fact stifles or even denies the woman's traumatic experience. As a result, the woman looks at her husband at the end with sadness, feeling that he should have stood up and declared that he wouldn’t turn her away, especially in her time of need. We understand that she has to forgive him for his wavering – instead of the old clichés of him having to forgive her for being impure or for being guilty of being raped. He begs for forgiveness for his silence.