Toward a Jewish Religious Realism in Israeli Cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The article examines changes in the relationship between film and religion in contemporary Israeli cinema by looking at three films that exemplify these changes, Ushpizin (Gidi Dar, 2004), The Wedding Plan (Rama Burshtein, 2016), and Tikkun (Avishai Sivan, 2015). As a pioneering religious film, Ushpizin introduced two cinematic elements that were developed by subsequent Israeli films dealing with religion or faith. The first element draws its inspiration from the romantic comedy genre and is visible in The Wedding Plan, a romantic comedy that demonstrates the partiality of Israeli religious cinema to a genre that has been marginal in local cinema until recently. The second element explores the power of cinema to convey transcendent, spiritual, or meditative sensibilities in Tikkun, an arthouse film that begins to articulate a new cinematic vocabulary of Jewish religious sensibilities.