Documentary Film about Singer Dafna Armoni made by her daughter, Ella Armoni

Girl, Woman ((ספק ילדה, ספק אשה, directed by Ella Armoni, is a fascinating and masterful work of art.  It offers the portrait of two women – mother and daughter – one a singer and the other a filmmaker.

The mother, Dafna Armoni, was an iconic singer with a painful story.  As a young woman, she sang in Avi Nesher’s 1978 cult film, The Troupe (aka Sing Your Heart Out) about an army singing troupe. She was a singing sensation, and over the years she shared a stage with, among others,  Shalom Hanoch, Arik Einstein, the Dag HaNachash – all of which we see in archival clips. At the age of 37, she gave birth to twins – Ella and Eden. The father of the twins has been a well-kept secret all these years.

The daughter, Ella, is a filmmaker.  Now, at the age of 30, she is making a film about her mother and about their complicated relationship.

Today, Dafna is a lonely and depressed woman with financial difficulties.  While cleaning out her cluttered apartment, she gives Ella a small suitcase that she tells her to keep for her and not to open.  Obviously, Ella opens it anyway, and finds it filled with letters from her father whose identity was always a secret, and many video recordings of the twins as little children back in the 90s, as if these recordings were made as return letters to the secret father.

Girl, Woman (documentary, 2025, 80 minutes) is an extraordinary film, filled with angst, introspection and love.  It is available from Go2Films.

 

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.

The Lesson by Anat Zuria

Anat Zuria is a talented documentary filmmaker who lives and works in the Jerusalem area and makes films that deal with religious women and women's issues -- check out Purity and Sentenced to Marriage -- both about issues of Judaism and women (both have previously been reviewed on this blog). 

Her latest film, The Lesson (90 minutes, documentary),  is also about a religious woman -- in this case, a Muslim woman named Layla who grew up in Egypt and came as a young bride to live in Jerusalem with her new husband.  Layla is not her given name -- it is the name that was assigned to her when she came to live in Israel at the age of 15.  This is the first hint of strange circumstances, which even she appears not to fully understand.

Today, Layla is an elegant, mature woman who is learning to drive.  Through the discussions that she has with her driving teacher, we get to know her, to see her as a remarkable and expressive woman, and an intimate portrait is drawn.  

We also meet Layla's family back in Egypt as she calls them via skype and we get to know one of her grown children -- her daughter Hagar who was brought up in Jewish schools.  Hagar writes compelling and beautiful songs -- but her mother, in a moving moment, expresses her disappointment that her daughter addresses God in Hebrew and not in Arabic.  

As the circumstances of Layla's life are slowly unfolding before us, we realize that this is a complex story.  It is about the hardships of being a Palestinian in Jerusalem, the difficulties imposed by the  security wall/separation barrier, about loneliness and being  a woman on her own, struggling to hold on to her own identity and her ties to her past.  It is also about her troubled relations with her children and about their issues of national and religious identity. 

A haunting and sensitive film, The Lesson, which won an award for best documentary at the Haifa Film Festival 2012, is available from Go2Films.

Michal Bat-Adam

Actress, director and scriptwriter, Michal Bat-Adam, has directed ten feature films, all dealing with complex relationships, unique friendships and passionate loves of women. Her most recent film, Maya (2010), is an in-depth look at an aspiring actress and how she becomes emotionally involved with her first major role.

Maya is an acting student. After a major disappointment, she finally succeeds in landing a major role, playing a young woman who goes crazy when her parents force her to have an abortion. The script is written by the director of the play, with whom Maya becomes involved, and this is a story that actually happened to his cousin, whom he loved. As Maya is becoming obsessively involved with her character, she goes to a mental hospital to learn more and she begins to see things radically differently from the director. Slowly, we see that Maya can't stop herself from becoming her character, and from interpreting her role in her own way, thereby offending her lover/director/playwright.

According to an Israeli radio interview with Michal Bat Adam (broadcast on Reshet Bet, May 14, 2010), this film is about the struggle between the truth of two different perspectives. Although the director sets the stage, the actress also is a human being with feelings and interpretations and experiences, and her perspective is also expressed.

However, as Maya becomes more and more drawn into her character, we must ask ourselves: where is the line that delineates between the actress' real self and the role that she is playing?

As the first Israeli woman to direct a feature film, Bat-Adam made her debut film, Moments, in 1979, a prize-winning film which expresses emotions and feelings cinematically rather than through the use of dialogue. Seen in flashback, the story is about Yola (Bat-Adam), a pensive young writer who meets Anne, a French tourist, on the train from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This chance meeting develops into a complex, intense relationship which includes a powerful love between two women, a love expressed without physical contact, and later through the sexual sharing of the same male partner. By sharing her partner, Yola expresses her love for Anne.

More a love scene between two women than a three-way love affair, this is Yola's unique way of sharing intimacy with another woman. This triangular love scene offended the sensitivities of the 1979 Israeli Censorship Board and had to be trimmed before its Israeli release. In today’s world, it wouldn’t have caused any problems!

A film of telling looks, self-absorption and silences, Moments challenges traditional relationships and portrays more "between the lines", than up front on the screen. It is a story of metaphysical lesbian love which mellows with the years.

Two of Bat-Adam's films, A Thin Line (1980) and Aya, An Imagined Autobiography (1994), portray mother-daughter relationships. A Thin Line, Bat-Adam's second feature film, is a psychological study of a Tel Aviv woman with emotional problems. Similar to Moments in its emphasis on mood, feelings and facial expressions, A Thin Line is an autobiographical film which focuses on a mother's dependency on her 11-year-old daughter who struggles to sustain her in times of need. The girl's story is continued in Aya: An Imagined Autobiography, a more profound look at the emotional turmoil of the girl's life. Combining elements from her previous films, Aya (Bat-Adam), now a grown woman haunted by memories of her past, is making a film about her own life. Moving between past and present, the film does not tell a story as such, but instead provides fragments from Aya's life. "God exists in the little things," says filmmaker Aya, as the film concludes and the pages of her script whirl in the wind around her. Similar to other Bat-Adam films, Aya is a highly touching personal document about relationships between mother and daughter, the hardships of young girls growing up, and the conflicts of mature women as they grapple with memories of their past.

These two films, A Thin Line and Aya, An Imagined Autobiography, portray images of the Israeli/Jewish mother that have shifted from stereotypical portrayals of the overbearing and manipulative mother to rich characters grappling with difficult relationships. Bat-Adam has added more nuance and complexity to the classical stereotype (which originates in Yiddish and Hollywood films) of the Jewish mother.

The feature films directed by Michal Bat-Adam are Moments (1979), A Thin Line (1980), Boy Meets Girl (1983), The Lover (1986), A Thousand and One Wives (1989), The Deserter's Wife (1992), Aya: An Imagined Autobiography (1994), Love at Second Sight (1998), Life is Life (2003) and Maya (2010).

Mother-Daughter Relations

One of my favorite Israeli feature films of all time is about the complexities of the mother-daughter connection. Blind Man's Bluff (Aner Preminger, 1993) deals with a mother's stifling and manipulative demands on her daughter and the daughter's initial striving to comply with those demands. The daughter eventually summons all of her strength to break out of the cycle of expectations, and to assert her own independence, although causing pain in the process.

Blind Man's Bluff, based on a book by Lily Perry, is a rich and sensitive film about a young woman named Mickey, studying to be a concert pianist. Mickey is an only child, a single woman, and a second generation Holocaust survivor. Her overbearing mother is a major obstacle in her path to independence and maturity. Mickey is also frustrated in her relationships with men – a ruthless violinist who uses her to build his own career, a lawyer who leads her on, her aging grandfather, and her weak father.

Mickey's mother has devoted her life to pushing her daughter ahead in her career. She helped her from her earliest piano recital as a child and now, years later, Mickey plays piano for her mother's ballet school. Both Mickey and her mother want more for her, but ironically, the more her mother pushes her, the more Mickey finds it difficult to lead the life of her mother's dreams. She must chart her own path. Befriended by a young prostitute, sporting outrageously flamboyant clothes (a metaphor for the opposite of her mother's dreams for her), Mickey slowly begins to find her own way.

A film of depth, Blind Man's Bluff is about a woman's loneliness, growth and development. As she gains independence and learns not to live only by the expectations of others, she becomes more ambivalent about her own future. According to director Aner Preminger, the title of the film refers to the children's game in which people attack you, use you and exploit you until you gather sufficient strength to break out of the circle. In Hebrew, the title Golem Be'Ma'agal has an additional meaning, referring to Mickey's smashing the cocoon of family and friends as she matures towards independence.

Blind Man's Bluff is available from the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University.