To Take A Wife

Three days before the Sabbath in Haifa in 1979. Viviane is raising three children, working from home and trying to keep to the strict Moroccan traditions of her family. Her husband and her brothers want one thing from her: that she stay married. She is expected to leave behind such notions as being loved and being free. The film builds that pressure not as loud drama but out of ordinary scenes in a kitchen and a corridor. One of the directors also plays Viviane. The camera hardly ever leaves the flat, and the outside exists only as a pressure coming from behind the door. The ninety seven minute Israeli film by Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz was completed in 2004.