Soreret

Two young women from Israel, who wouldn't be out of place in any cool café in the world, coming across just as smart and fashion-conscious as their contemporaries in Berlin or Buenos Aires. But blogger Sarah and photographer Shlomit have paid a high price to have arrived in the here and now as modern women. Both of them were cast out by their families after fleeing from the ultra-orthodox Haredi community. Over the last decade, the community has become more strongly fundamental, with girls and women feeling the pinch of this move towards radicalization in the form of heightened repression and extreme restrictions in their freedom of movement. Thus, in the so-called "Black Bus", women are only allowed to sit at the back, so that any sort of fleeting contact with men they do not know can be avoided. It is in these surroundings that Shlomit works as a photographer, documenting the daily moments of confrontation as they take place, while Sarah blogs about the consequences of this escalation of the gender conflict. Both Sarah and Shlomit are searching for a new identity, whether with the camera or the internet – the film creates a portrait of them as the protagonists of a largely unnoticed societal conflict in today's Israel.
Dorothee Wenner
Gender apartheid in Israel
SORERET is the third film in a trilogy that focuses on obscure and enigmatic stories about women that occur within the Israeli democracy. In Black Bus, I chose to describe a reality of gender apartheid to which a blind eye is turned, and which may not be chronicled or photographed. It seems almost impossible to obtain a cinematic record of the reality of women’s lives in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world, a world in which they are forbidden to speak out and any violation of the rules results in banishment. The script in the case of Black Bus is based on the subversive documentation carried out by two rebellious young women, Shulamit and Sara, who grew up in Haredi families and decided to abandon the ultra-Orthodox lifestyle. Both were “bad girls” who explored and documented the reality around them, in Jerusalem and in other parts of Israel, in words and photography.
Both of the film’s protagonists took tremendous risks to document the lives of those who live under the rigid regime of gender separation and religious extremism. In the film, in addition to the verbal exploration of the subject, I tried to breathe life into the forbidden world of visual images, the body language of the Haredi women, which is revealed through the lens of Shulamit’s camera as she roams through the streets of Jerusalem or inside the segregated buses at night. The images move on a regular, consistent course, with the women in the back and the men, as always, in the front. Although these courageous young women, Sara and Shulamit, have departed from the Haredi world, the Haredi world’s judgmental perspective of them, which threatened to destroy them, is never completely gone from their awareness. They are fated to struggle with the inner voices that would deny them their independence. The film, which explores the heroine’s boundaries of imagined choices and of the women that they choose to document does not end happily ever after, because loneliness and inner alienation will always be part of the lives of those who are punished by being forever cut off from their families.
Anat Yuta Zuria
No esoteric phenomenon
Ten years ago, when Anat Yuta Zuria began her transition from art to cinema, she began to take an interest in dealing with a world that contained both a story and a script. She had studied in the Ma'aleh Film School and wanted to direct TEHORAH (PURITY; 2002) as her final project after four years of study – “But I was afraid that I would be censored, after all, Ma'aleh is a religious film school, and consequently it was rejected. I don’t recall the exact moment when I decided to make films that focus on taboos,” she explains, “but my documentary work emanates from personal experiences, and the more I was drawn into it, the more I felt driven to make films about women that fall into different kinds of traps.”
Before Zuria began working on SORERET, she tried to get to the bottom of this ever-growing movement to separate the sexes. “Yes, I received explanations,” she says with a sigh. “In order for the Messiah to come, Judaism has to be pure, and it will be pure only if men do not think about sexuality at all. And in order for that to happen, women have to be made to disappear from the landscape. And if women do not even enter the imaginations of men, redemption will come. Do you get that? This explanation is what has led to the fact that on some public buses in Israel as well as on buses of private transportation companies, men sit in the front and women may only sit in the back third of the bus. It happens in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak and in other ultra-Orthodox satellite cities, such as Beitar Illit and Beit Shemesh. There are places where even the HMOs have been separated. A little girl complaining of back pain cannot be examined by the best doctor if he is a man – only by a woman doctor. There are already grocery stores that operate according to this separation, with hours for men and hours for women, and it goes without saying that an ultra-Orthodox woman may not learn how to drive, not even with a woman teacher, because if she has a driver’s license, who knows where she’ll go off to.”
Zuria documents this revolution in her film, SORERET, by means of two people: Shulamit Weinfeld, a photographer who grew up in ultra-Orthodox society, and Sara Einfeld, a former member of the Gur Hassidic movement, mother of two children, who divorced her husband and writes a subversive blog. “I looked for women who were documenting the silencing of women and who themselves refused to be silenced,” says Zuria, “and with my own eyes, I saw the price they are forced to pay. When I got to know Shulamit, she was still taking pictures secretly, and when her father caught her in the street with a camera, he threw her out of the house. Both young women were banned, as rebellious women should be. In the ultra-Orthodox world, when a child makes problems, the family is forced to cut the child off, and the way I see it, this is akin to incest. In the past, it was believed that a husband is entitled to do whatever he feels like to his wife, until that horror was finally put to an end. If we continue to relate to the separation movement as an esoteric phenomenon, a feature of the ultra-Orthodox ghetto, we will be contributing to its spreading.”
Smadar Shir, in: Yedioth Ahronoth, Tel Aviv, October 15, 2009
A challenge
Violation of a taboo in the ultra-Orthodox world leads to banishment, but even those who leave the ultra-Orthodox world remain haunted by tormenting thoughts. The most difficult ones relate to the state of their mental health. “Now I need to prove to myself that I’m sane,” says Shulamit, who already has one failed suicide attempt behind her. She is an attractive law student and a gifted, but lonely photographer. Sara, a mother of two and a successful blogger, suffers her share of pain too. “They managed to convince me that I’m mentally disturbed. That’s me. I am waiting for me outside,” she explained to an ultra-Orthodox friend who is wavering between the two worlds, trying to decide what to do with his life. The heroines are confronted by a central, noisy enemy – the bus. “The bus is a trauma that caused me a great deal of pain,” Sara describes her moment of illumination.
The role of this moving and delicate film is just beginning. After all, the bus is merely the symbol, not the goal. In Hassidic circles, this film will be viewed as an invitation to a duel. The question is who will fight next to Sara and Shulamit on the other side.
Shir Ziv, in: Yisrael Hayom, Jerusalem, October 18, 2009
Sisterhood of rebels
As can be seen from the inflammatory articles written against the film and its protagonists on the ultra-Orthodox web sites, when the two young women are referred to as “rebels,” it does not refer only to the fact of their becoming nonobservant, but rather to the autonomous activism both young women demonstrate. Their voice is heard thanks to the fact that they are both creative and artistic: Sara writes a subversive blog and shares her experiences with the whole world, and Shulamit takes still photographs of ultra-Orthodox life. In this respect, Zuria’s film is also about yet another rebel – the director herself – whose voice is heard indirectly through the stories of the two other artists, and her cinematic language mediates Sara’s words and Shulamit’s visual images. Can these three languages of creative art overcome the unseen world of the modesty revolution in the ultra-Orthodox world of the past decade? How will the cinematic language depict the hatred for women there, which appears in the guise of a mystical desire to fix the world and of halachic norms?
Raya Morag, in: Eretz Acheret, Issue No 54, Jerusalem, January 2010