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After 15 years of providing her family from Israel, Bella must go back to Ukraine to rediscover both herself and her home.

synopsis

50-year-old Bella has been working devotedly for the Bar family in the affluent Caesarea, in Israel, for almost 15 years now, and regularly sending money to her husband and two children in a poor village in Ukraine. Bella convinces herself that the only reason for the temporary affair she is having with Avraham, the Ethiopian security guard of the rich neighbourhood, is to help her deal with her homesickness. Despite the geographical distance, Bella feels she is still connected to her family and involved in their lives. One day she discovers that her daughter is pregnant, and no one told her about it. Bella is hurt and disillusioned, she decides that it is time to leave everything and go back home to fight for her place in the family. Bella returns to her old life as a different person, trying to rediscover both herself and her home, and to reunite her family. Slowly she realises that for her, there is no way back home.

Director’statement

14 years after my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, she agreed to let into the house a worker. A bulldozer dug a deep cavern under the house, to build an underground room for the new housekeeper. Suddenly, there was another woman in the house; she would be the housewife my mother could not be anymore. After meeting her, I became obsessed with exploring immigrant workers’ stories around me and discovered a big group of women who’ve been living on a geographical seam. In my story, Bella returns to her home after years. It is the confrontation between past and present and how much we change from the person we were, becoming alienated with the place and people we used to call home. People like Bella have been sacrificing everything they have, to build a future that, in the end, might not belong to her. The gap between the woman Bella was when she left and the woman she is today is the story I want to tell. This gap, in some way, is also the gap within which I live. Caught between the patriarchal conventions I grew up with and the modern liberated woman I am trying to be.

TFL PROGRAMME:
ScriptLab 2020
Discover more details here:
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TFL Catalogue 2020

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