Kadosh

France, Israel

1999

110 Min

Color

1.85:1

Hebrew

Subtitled in English

Audio in Hebrew

Currently 3.7/5 Stars.
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PROD Amos Gitai, Michel Propper

SCR Amos Gitai, Éliette Abécassis

CAST Yaël Abecassis, Yoram Hattab, Meital Barda, Uri Klauzner, Yussuf Abu-Warda, Leah Koening, Sami Huri, Rivka Michaeli, Samuel Calderon

ED Monica Coleman, Kobi Netanel

MUSIC Philippe Eidel, Louis Sclavis

Cannes (In Competition), Toronto (Contemporary World Cinema), Telluride

Synopsis

The year 2000 approaches in Jerusalem’s Orthodox Mea Shearim quarter, where the women work, keep house, and have children so the men can study the Torah and the Talmud. Rivka is happily and passionately married to Meir, but they remain childless. The yeshiva’s rabbi, who is Meir’s father, wants Meir to divorce Rivka: “a barren woman is no woman.” Rivka’s sister, Malka, is in love with Yakov, a Jew shunned by the yeshiva as too secular. The rabbi arranges Malka’s marriage to Yossef, whose agitation when fulfilling religious duties approaches the grotesque. Can the sisters sort out their hearts’ desires within this patriarchal world? If not, have they any other options? —IMDb

Director

Amos Gitai

Born in Haifa in 1950, as the second son of architect Munio Weinraub and former Sionist activist Efratia Margalit. On the year of his birth, his parents changed the family name to “Gitai”, which is the Hebrew translation of the German name “Weinraub”. While he was a student in architecture, Amos Gitai joined the Yom Kippur war in 1973 as a reserve duty officer, and served as part of a helicopter rescue team. While serving during the war, he started filming with a 8mm camera his mother gave him as his birthday present. On his 23rd birthday, October 11th 1973, his helicopter was shot down by a Syrian missile. Among the 7 crews on board, 6 of them survived, including Gitai himself, who was inspired by this traumatic experience to quit architecture and move to filmmaking. He made a documentary on this incident and his fellow survivors, “Kippur: War Memories” in 1993, then a fictional recreation of it “Kippur” in 2000.

in 1979, Gitai directed his first feature-length documentary “House”… read more