Esty Shushan has blazed a trail as an activist for women\u2019s rights in the haredi community, founding the organization Nivcharot \u2013 Ultra-Orthodox Women for Voice and Equality.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s also a podcaster, artist, and poet, not to mention a mother of four. Now, she has found a different way to express herself, by directing her first full-length feature film, a powerful drama called The Book of Ruth, which opened in theaters across Israel on Thursday.<\/p>\n
It stars Meshi Kleinstein as Ruth, a young haredi (ultra-Orthodox) wife and mother whose world is shattered when she and her husband are forced to cope with a sudden, devastating tragedy. While her husband, Shmuel (Aury Alby), who blames himself for what happened, is drawn to increasingly extreme religious observance, Ruth struggles to find a way to move forward.<\/p>\n
Shushan is used to fighting authorities and speaking out loudly and clearly about what she believes, but her movie is a complex, poetic, and philosophical story about finding meaning in life after suffering a loss that can be interpreted in many ways.<\/p>\n
When she talks about it, she uses the word \u201cmessage,\u201d but then corrects herself, saying, \u201cThere isn\u2019t a message in the conventional sense in the movie. What I was trying to do was really, first of all, to allow the audience to enter a somewhat foreign world, a slightly different world.\u201d<\/p>\n
haredi women (credit: REUTERS)<\/p>\n
She realizes that the film, which she wrote more than a decade ago, will be seen by a largely secular audience, although she said that quite a few in the ultra-Orthodox<\/a> world will likely see it as well, eventually. But still, most of the audience will be from outside her community.<\/p>\n Without filters<\/p>\n \u201cI want them to go into it, I would say, without the usual filters, without romanticizing this world, but to identify with the characters and look inward into what it means for them in their own lives,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Shushan is acutely aware of all that has been happening in the haredi world recently, and she noted that a screening of the film in Jerusalem took place on the evening of the disaster in a daycare center<\/a> where two infants died.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople came carrying that with them\u2026 The film tells a different story, but the questions it raises are about that gap \u2013 between our responsibility as human beings and placing responsibility on God<\/a>\u2026 I\u2019m aware of that gap; I know it. As a religious woman, I know that faith is an anchor that really helps us hold ourselves steady against a world that is sometimes hard to understand, why it\u2019s run the way it is, and why bad things happen.<\/p>\n \u201cIn recent years, especially after the Meron disaster [an event in which 45 men and boys attended a religious celebration and were crushed to death in 2021], it really sharpened this for me. In all kinds of cases like this, I find myself asking, mainly in relation to the authorities, those who were supposed to supervise and make sure things didn\u2019t collapse there, why they didn\u2019t do what they were supposed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Another important issue the film raises is how even people with good intentions can be pushed into extremism and intolerance. \u201cOne of the things I wanted to examine was how tragedies serve as a discourse of radicalization. I mean, I think that\u2019s what happens with the character of Shmuel.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really to look at a father\u2019s pain like that\u2026 He feels guilt; he takes the guilt onto himself. And the way he chooses to cleanse himself of that guilt is literally to cleanse himself of everything he thinks doesn\u2019t serve God, but he cuts himself off in many ways from his wife and so many other aspects of life.\u201d<\/p>\n The film\u2019s heroine chooses a different way: \u201cFirst of all, she wants to be inside the pain, to stay inside the pain. Not to immediately try to fix it in all sorts of ways, to find some route toward repair or healing. Her way is to look at everything differently\u2026<\/p>\n At the beginning, she thinks she mainly wants quiet. There\u2019s so much noise coming at her from outside and also at home.\u201d Eventually, Ruth finds her path, and late in the film, there is a twist that brings her story full circle, with a kind of poetic justice.<\/p>\n A layer of music<\/p>\n The music also added another layer to the film, and she spoke about collaborating with acclaimed musician Dudu Tassa on the film\u2019s theme song. After they saw a rough cut of the film, she told him she wanted a theme song for the film, and he asked if she had lyrics for it.<\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018I don\u2019t have lyrics, but I have one line that\u2019s been stuck in my head for a long time. Let\u2019s start with that and see where it takes you.\u2019 It was a line from a prayer, \u2018Please, God, heal her.\u2019 Moses says it in the desert, for Miriam, his sister. He simply picked up the guitar and started playing, and I started writing the words as he played.\u201d The song is now available on multiple platforms.<\/p>\n The film was finished before the war, but Shushan wanted to wait until after it was over to release it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve gone through two very hard years, extremely hard, things we never could have imagined. When I wrote the song and when I made the movie, I didn\u2019t think we would go through things like this, that we would experience events as surreal as these. I think the emotions raised by the war<\/a> come through in the story and in the theme song. I want there to be a little comfort, a little healing at the end of the film. So that we remember, too, that even after the very worst, we\u2019re here, we\u2019re alive, we have to live.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Esty Shushan has blazed a trail as an activist for women\u2019s rights in the haredi community, founding the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[40489,85,46,43,12185,4164],"class_list":{"0":"post-278710","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-cinema","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-ultra-orthodox","13":"tag-women"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}