A pleasing coming together of real-looking women whose common goal is to learn to use a video camera, Cinema Sabaya has the rough-edged look and feel of a no-frills documentary. But that’s its deliberate deception, making the audience forget the characters are fictional and the story scripted. Cleverly exploiting the overlap between her own professional life as a short filmmaker and her experience as a workshop teacher, director Orit Fouks Rotem blurs the truth-or-fiction edges. She also makes some superb casting choices (almost all the actresses are non-pro) which are reason enough to watch Israel’s Oscar candidate for Best International Feature Film.
Among the film’s many prizes are three of Israel’s top Ophir Awards for best film and best director, with a best supporting actress nod to the unforgettable Joanna Said as Souad, a bottled-up Palestinian woman bowed by her traditional, overbearing husband. Wearing a hijab and voluminous clothes, this soft-spoken mother of six is not the first character one focuses on when, in the opening scene, the eight students file into Rona’s workshop. But as the film progresses, Souad seems more and more to embody everything Fouks Rotem wants to say about women’s role in Israeli society, from their longing for more freedom to be themselves to their dangerously repressed anger. Though the way this collective drama is told is hardly original, it is heartfelt and will reach women viewers with particular force.
This is the first workshop that young filmmaker Rona has led (she is played with natural aplomb and a dose of ambiguity by Dana Ivgy, who was one of the female soldiers in Zero Motivation) but she seems very open-minded in proposing her “exercises” in using a vidcam and handling a sound boom. No mention is made of how four Jewish and four Arab women were selected for the course, leaving the viewer to wonder at the diversity of the student body. The whole film takes place in the spacious but well-delineated confines of an airy community center, which encourages bonding on the part of the participants as natural empathy crosses the religious and cultural divide, prejudices dissolve and sisterly feeling prevails. Could that have been the organizers’ goal all along?
The age range of the students is wide and the older women are most individualized and arresting. A self-confident housewife openly shares her fears of bumping into a woman terrorist on the street; Carmela, a grinning rough-hued woman who lives aboard a sailboat with her dog, shocks the company by announcing she has no children and no husband (later, in a film exercise, she goes further, saying she wishes she had a companion, “male or female”.) Lesbianism is touched on again when the women ask Rona about the screensaver on her computer: a photo in which she is kissing a woman on the mouth. The secretive Rona dismisses it, without fully answering the question. The delicate handling of this regional hot-button issue is laudable, but its main impact will be on Middle Eastern viewers.
Rona’s strategy is to have the women film their own lives – their homes, families – and she pushes them to dare to dream as they enlarge their horizons. This quickly takes the narrative into psychoanalytical territory, with Rona as the non-committal shrink urging them to express themselves. Watching their homegrown footage projected on a screen also opens the film itself up to life beyond the confines of the workshop. Cinematographer Itay Marom adopts a sky blue color scheme amid darker shadows, and a painted wall with simple seagulls is seen several times reminding us that freedom is possible.
Perhaps the most satisfying thing about Cinema Sabaya is the way the film gets its points across with such subtlety. Even the title hides a cultural trap. The Palestinians tell the Jews: the way you pronounce Sabaya, it means “prisoners of war” in Arabic. Then they pronounce it differently, so it means “a group of young women.” So words count and as the films shows, so do the images women make of themselves.
Director, screenwriter: Orit Fouks Rotem
Cast: Dana Ivgy, Joanna Said, Amal Mukus, Ruth Landau, Yulia Tagli, Marlene Bajali, Aseel Farhat, Orit Samuel, Liora Levi, Khawlah Hag Debsy
Producers: Maya Fischer, Gal Greenspan, Roi Kurland
Cinematography: Itay Marom
Art director: Hefi Bohem
Costume design: Rachel Ben Dahan
Editing: Neta Dvorkis
Music: Karni Postel
Sound design: Julien Mizac
Sound mix: Jean-Francois Levillain
Production companies: Green Productions (Israel), Neon Rouge (Belgium)
World sales: Memento Films International
Distributor: Kino Lorber
Venue: Palm Springs Film Festival (Awards Buzz)
In Hebrew, Arabic
91 minutes
