Family pressures explored
Fill The Void (Lemale et ha’halal)
Monday, August 27, 7pm Davis Theatre, Whanganui Regional Museum Directed by Rama Burshtein • Israel • 2012
90 mins • M • In Hebrew with English subtitles
Set in Tel Aviv in an orthodox Hassidic family, this film follows 18-year-old Shira’s search for a husband after her older sister dies in childbirth.
Marriage is a central focus in this community and here the concept of ‘a good match’ is especially complicated, with a grief-stricken mother who has more than Shira’s happiness in mind. Watching Shira negotiate the labyrinth of familial pressure, religious precedent, and her own burgeoning sentiment is both painful and beautiful — there are no easy choices to be made and the viewer travels back and forth with Shira as she struggles to take ‘the best path’.
Writer-director Rama Burshtein investigates the complexities of her own community without judgment: instead we must evaluate for ourselves the strengths and challenges of this closed group and its religious and cultural practices. Ultimately we can only sympathise with characters who are caught, as we all are, between their wishes and desires and the very particular world they find themselves in. What does ‘doing what you want’ look like when you are bound tightly in a loving familial context, upon which your happiness depends?
— Jo Randerson, NZ International Film Festival 2013