This week's Times Will Tell is a recording of a recent sold-out Times of Israel live event in Jerusalem, featuring an English language screening of the award-winning "Cinema Sabaya" film followed by a conversation with filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem.
"Cinema Sabaya," starring Dana Ivgy, tells the story of Arab and Jewish female municipal workers who take part in a video workshop, documenting their own lives and viewing each others’ — challenging their beliefs in order to get to know one another.
Fouks Rotem spoke with Times of Israel arts and culture editor Jessica Steinberg about the making of the film, her casting of mostly unknown actors who had a lot of freedom with the script and her goals in making this movie about women of different stripes.
As the Best Picture winner in the Ophir Awards, Israel's version of the Oscars, "Cinema Sabaya" automatically became Israel’s selection for consideration as a foreign film nominee at the 2023 Academy Awards in the United States, a voting race that Fouks Rotem describes as well.
The following transcript has been very lightly edited.
Times of Israel: This week's Times Will Tell is a recording of a recently sold-out Times@10 event, a screening in English of “Cinema Sabaya,” the award-winning Israeli film that is Israel's choice for an Oscar foreign film nomination, followed by a conversation with director Orit Fouks Rotem, at Jerusalem's Yes Planet. Have a listen and enjoy.
I'm very pleased to introduce Orit Fouks Rotem, the director of Cinema Sabaya, which won the Ophir Award, Israel's Oscar for Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress for Joanna Said, Best Costumes and Best Casting. Cinema Sabaya is the underdog film that unexpectedly swept the awards, automatically making it Israel's selection for consideration as foreign film nominee at the 2023 Academy Awards in the US. It's also Orit’s first full feature film, one that she worked on for eight years. She's a graduate of Jerusalem's Sam Spiegel Film School. And we considered showing this screening there in the new arts campus where they have a screening room that fits 120. That's the largest one, but it wouldn't have fit all of you. So it’s a good thing that we did it here at Yes Planet. It's very good to have you here and we're going to have a little conversation that we’ll also open to some questions from the audience.
I know your mother was involved in the initial idea. So if you could tell us a little bit of the story of how it came about and how your mother was involved in it from the very start.
Orit Fouks Rotem: So thank you for coming and taking the time to watch the film. Yeah, so my mother is the advisor for women's issues to the mayor of Hadera and she was a participant in a group like this, like you just saw, she studied stills photography with Arab women in the area of Hadera. And I just finished film school and looked for an idea for a film and she told me about the course and I thought it's very interesting platform to discuss a lot of subjects through women and through women's eyes. And then I started making those kind of groups as research for a few years.
Tell us how you found your first group. That's a great story.
So I wanted to make this kind of group and I didn't really know what I'm going to do, so I just went to Acre because someone told me, you should go to Acre.
There are a lot of Jewish and a lot of Arab women. I just walked in the street and asked women if they want to study how to use the video cameras. And they looked at me like I'm crazy. And then I went to this small shop and this woman there told me, go to this place. There are women meeting there once a week. It was like a shelter and I offered them to teach them a course of video filmmaking and they said yes. And then I just went there once a week for a while and actually made up this course that you saw in the film. And on the way I thought, maybe it can be also a documentary. But then I understood that many of the things that came up there, I wouldn't be able to use them in a documentary. So I decided to go with my first plan and make a fiction film. But take this conflict for this character that I wrote based on me, of course. And that's it. That's my mother's.
So your mother helped get you started. Art imitates life. Life imitates art. You wrote the film, you were thinking about it as a documentary, but ended up making it into a feature film. Tell us a little bit about why you wanted those elements of truth and reality as opposed to full-on fiction.
For me, as a viewer, when I believe what I see, it touches me. And if I don't believe it, I can understand it intellectually, but I don't feel it. So for me, it's the most important thing to do is to make this believable. And that was the way I think, to make it believable. Because a lot of people ask me after the film if it's a documentary or if it's a fiction film, mostly outside of Israel, where they don't know that I've been an...
