About two and a half weeks before the Ofir Awards ceremony, “Cinema Sabaya” is released, which is nominated in the best feature film category and in 11 other categories. He deserves every one of the dozen nominations he received, and if and when – he will also deserve every award. Similar to “Karaoke”, one of its main competitors, the name of this film is not in Hebrew either.
In his case, it is a combination of English and Arabic. “Cinema” is a cinema of course, and “Sabaya”, in a literal western translation – girls. As the name implies, it deals with a Jewish filmmaker who leads a photography and video workshop in the northern region. Her students are eight women of different ages, all of them municipal workers who came primarily for the reward of further education, and there are Jews and Arabs among them.
Among the Jewish women there is a married woman and mother of children, who is literally a poster girl for the new Israeli bourgeoisie, but also a bisexual who has never been institutionalized, a woman who suffered from domestic violence and a woman who comes from the Commonwealth of Nations, who had to go back to live with her parents. Among the Arab women there are two who wear a hijab and two who don’t, with one of them living in a particularly patriarchal relationship: despite all her pleas, her partner does not agree to her getting a driver’s license. Through these eight women, the film deals with a variety of political and social issues.
One of them is the inequality between Jews and Arabs, which is revealed at the beginning of the workshop. It turns out that the lessons will be conducted in Hebrew. A young Arab participant protests and asks how this can be. Her older friend, an Arab who has already gotten used to this distortion, says, “We know Hebrew and they don’t know Arabic, so it will be in Hebrew. That’s how it is.”
The film touches on inequality and other issues in several other places as well, but it does not pretend to assemble a mosaic of Israeli society and does not spout slogans about brotherhood and coexistence. It was easy to fall into these traps, but “Sabaya Cinema” set much more complex goals for itself. There is no more modern adaptation of “Lysistrata” here. The women do not unite and go out of the workshop to make the world a better place.
Many Israeli films revolved around the tension between public and private space, and the uniqueness of Sabaya Cinema is that it does not leave the private space for a moment, and what takes place in it does not necessarily have an effect on external reality. In this space we meet only the workshop leader and her students. Men, if at all, appear only for a moment in their stories or in the exercises they film as part of the studies. In this way, this Israeli work is similar to “Portrait of a Girl on Fire”, the best French film of the previous decade, in which almost no male characters were seen either. Like him, he also creates a kind of utopia, where the patriarchy does not exist, or at least is not physically present.
Since the film takes place exclusively in this utopian space, where there is nothing beyond the teacher, the students and video cameras, it is clear that its subject is not “Israeli society” – it deals with more universal issues. One question is an ethical question. Is the workshop facilitator acting out of a mission, or is she actually taking advantage of her students? At some point it turns out that she was so impressed by the materials her students brought, that she thought of using them for a film of her own making – just like this film, of course. The apprentices are not enthusiastic about the invasion of privacy, and refuse to let you do it. Here the question also arises: Is there such a good story, that it would be a waste not to tell it to the world?
Another question is not ethical, but related to the power of the gaze. To say that “Sabaya Cinema” illustrates the power of the camera and the cinema is self-evident. His move is more complex. Throughout history and even today, the “male gaze” dominates cinema. Men stand behind the camera and take pictures of women, often voyeuristically.
This is an illustration of the patriarchy of society as a whole, and also a continuation of it. The women in this film turn the bowl upside down. They are the ones holding the camera. They are the ones taking pictures – themselves, or the men in their lives, who now contribute to being the ones peeking into their lives. The women in Sabaya Cinema are not the “muse” of any man. Both the notebooks and the subject. In this, too, it is similar to “Portrait of a Girl on Fire.”
This is Orit Fox-Rotem’s first feature film. Her short films were excellent in their own right and created anticipation for what was to come, and she delivered on that promise in the most satisfying way. “Sabaya Cinema” is brilliant in both content and form. More often than not, movies that take place behind closed doors turn out to be pale and monotonous. Here, the design of the picture turns out to be a celebration of colors – red, green and blue are mixed in a way that would not embarrass Almodovar.
Together with the Emanuel Mayer troupe, Fox-Rotem gathered an ensemble of actresses. Prominent among them are Dana Ivegi as the host of the workshop and Joanna Said as one of her apprentices. Both are nominated for Ofir for their work. She and the other stars of the film do an outstanding job, and the camera does well to bring out the best in their expressive faces. Throughout most of “Cinema Sabaya” the heroines are smiling, but most of the time it is not a smile of only happiness. The camera here also helps to illustrate what a spectrum of emotions there is in the human gaze and in particular in the human smile – embarrassment, curiosity, completion and above all anticipation.
Those who expect outbursts of rage, crying and laughter will not get what they want. It’s a movie that only has one climax, but it’s loaded with so much tension, meaning and dramatic power that there’s no need for more climaxes. It is also a moment that reveals that the power of the camera and cinematic illusion can be dangerous. “Sabaya Cinema” is too complex and decent a film to claim that cinema is the way to redemption and nothing else.
Not everything is perfect at Sabaya Cinema. He often falls into stereotypes. It is true that he also talks about violent Jewish men, but in the end the source of the greatest violence comes from the Arab man. At the end there is also a somewhat folkloristic enjoyment of Arab music, as if the Arab women’s role in the force is to “make happy” and add color and dancing. These are all points to think about, but they do not negate the value of the film, which is a masterpiece not only on a local scale, but also on an international scale.