Kino Lorber
Trying to connect our own lives with the ones we see on the screen is one of those ideas inherent in all art — but the people making that art are also putting themselves in the film in their own ways. Israeli filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem was inspired to make this movie based on her mother’s involvement in a local filmmaking course for women and her later work teaching her own course.
Cinema Sabaya is written and directed by Orit Fouks Rotem, and was the official entry for Israel in the Academy Awards. In the movie we follow Rona (Dana Ivgi) and her efforts to teach a class for the first time — a sort of neophyte introduction to moviemaking for women only at a specific community center that caters to cross-faith interactions (meaning Arab/Jewish in this case).
Rona has never done this sort of thing before, and although she is shown to be conversant and aware of film, her approach is potentially a complicated and fraught one. There’s an element of ‘how real is this?’ that permeates this, with a sort of low-fi vibe to the whole thing and a question mark of how much the director/writer taught her classes in the same way. Because if she did … then there are some ethical boundaries that Rona shouldn’t have crossed.
We meet a group of women of various walks of life — Carmela (Liora Levi), a sort of hippie free love type who lives on a boat; Awatef (Marlene Bajai), an elderly Arab woman content in her long life and steadfast in her faith; Yelena (Yulia Tagil), an Israeli divorcee living with her daughters and mother; Yelena (Ruth Landau), another divorcee who left a far more abusive situation; Eti (Orit Samuel), an Israeli married woman with an emotionally distant husband; Nasrin (Amal Murkus), an Arab politically active lawyer with dreams of fame; Nahed (Aseel Farhat), the youngest of the group, a Palestinian woman who doesn’t seem to keep with the faith; and Souad (Joanna Said), a religious mother of six woman with a palpable fear of her husband.
Rona gives the women assignments to film little snippets about their own life and share with the group, leading to often shocking and difficult conversations — but in the end, mostly supportive, positive interactions. The film touches on the onerous nature of certain religious practices, but it’s only a light touch, showing people with different perspectives of progressiveness.
The ambitious Rona sees the group as something amazing and starts to push them more and more, in ways that may be okay for a therapist, but Rona doesn’t necessarily grasp the right sorts of boundaries that should and shouldn’t be crossed. Otherwise, we really only stay in the center itself, interspersed with the different home movies shared by each of the women. As such it becomes an intimate, heartfelt affair that hurts all the more when things go awry.
It’s an interesting sort of indie movie, trying to do the ‘we’re more alike than we are different’ thing, while trying to respect some of the differences but not others. It doesn’t really have the maturity or full complexity to explore some of these weightier issues, but it does consider them and ask questions.
The women are, for the most part, all interesting characters, some more than others, and you’re left wanting to follow some in particular even after the movie ends. It’s an ambitious thing to have a movie that’s mostly talking and sitting around, but the usage of the home movie conceit keeps things moving, even if there are some artificially created drama pieces that aren’t really as effective.
Still, it’s an engaging movie, and with the cross-faith perspective, it’s easy to see why it was chosen as a representative at the Oscars, even if it wasn’t nominated this year (it’s always a competitive category). For those interested in this sort of light introspection, it’s decent enough.
Cinema Sabaya has a run time of 1 hour 31 minutes and is not rated.
Kino Lorber
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