Kadosh

The story of two sisters in the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim quarter of Jerusalem. Rivka loves her husband Meir but they have had no children for years, and the rabbi of the yeshiva, who is Meir's father, wants his son to divorce her. Her younger sister Malka is in love with Yakov, who lives outside the community, while her family is determined to marry her to a yeshiva student. Amos Gitai's film puts the position of women inside this arrangement at its centre, and its argument is plain: the rules work in favour of the men. It competed at Cannes in 1999, the first Israeli film selected for the competition since the seventies. The criticism it drew is worth noting too: some critics said Gitai had drawn the community as a one-dimensional structure of oppression, close to caricature. Yaël Abecassis plays Rivka.