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After 15 years of providing her family from Israel, Bella returns to Ukraine to rediscover her home.

Team

Or Sinai

IsraelFilm Director Writer

Adi Bar Yossef

IsraelProduction

synopsis

50 year-old Bella is finally going back home. For almost 15 years, she devoutly worked as a maid for a wealthy family in Israel and sent the money to her husband and two children in a poor village in Ukraine. All these years Bella had one goal: to create a better future for her family. Now she has to separate from her temporary Israeli identity, and say goodbye to the affair she was having with Avraham, the Ethiopian security guard of the rich neighbourhood. Finally free, Bella is ready to live the life she was dreaming of, in the new beautiful house she just finished building for her family. But when Bella returns to Ukraine, she discovers that things are very different from what she thought. She realises that her family is a broken family that does not need her anymore. More than anything, she is shocked by her daughter, who has managed to hide her 6-months pregnancy from her. Bella is fighting to win her family back at any cost, but slowly she realises that for her, there is no way back home.

Director’statement

After years of struggling with Parkinson’s disease, my mother decided to hire an immigrant 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. The fact that there was another woman in the house affected me a lot. I became obsessed with exploring immigrant workers’ stories around me and discovered a big group of women who have been living on a geographical seam. My artistic intentions all come from my desire to give Bella the opportunity to be pushed from the margins to the center of existence. 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 them.

TFL PROGRAMME:

FeatureLab 2021

Discover more details here:

PDF

TFL Catalogue 2021

TFL AWARDS:

TFL Production Award (€ 40,000)

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