A Group Portrait with a Woman

Director - Itzhak Rubin 
 
2003, Hebrew
Israel


Haifa Int'l Film Festival - Best Script Award

 
Cast: Michal Yanai, Natur Halifa, Sharon Alexander, Rusina Kambus, Alex Monte, Lupo Berkowitz, Traici Abramowitz

The uniqueness of the movie entails a combination of documentary segments of the real character confronting the director’s friends (all her age). The situation reaches its climax when the real character discloses herself to the viewers, towards the end of the movie, where she replaces the actress portraying her, and describes the epilog of her tragic life story.
 
The true story of an Israeli Jewish woman who left the country after being forced, by tragic circustances, to give her only daugter up for addoption, her child from a Muslim-Bedouin man.
 
Driven by her guilt and low self-esteem, the heroin allows abouse by the men in her life and goes through her own "Via Delorosa". Finally, she returnes to Israel to search for her lost child and finds herself, together with her director friend, in an unusual cinematic recreation of her life, a voyage that covers three decades, a number of countries and an un-ending escape into oblivion, survival and loss.
 
Her loves, her escapes, the men in her life, all serve as an echo to that one unfortunate act. Again, in an unusual manner, the heroine finds herself faced, like in a Greek chorus, with a re-examination of her life,and finds that nothing has changed over the years.
 

Scriptwriter & Producer: Itzhak Rubin
Photography: Benny Shoklander
Editing: Itzhak Rubin , Victor Turkia
Music: Doron Orsiano, Avner Gavrieli