Kadosh

Cannes: Festival de Cannes 1999 - Official selection, in competition
This third film in the trilogy about cities is set in Mea Shearim, the ultra-orthodox neighbourhood of Jerusalem. Meïr and Rivka have been married for ten years but have to divorce because they have no children. Malka, Rivka's sister, is in love with Yaakov, who has chosen to live outside the community. The rabbi makes a decision: Malka will marry Yossef, his assistant. Rivka falls prey to solitude, while Malka chooses another path: rebellion. « Kadosh - the title means "sacred" - addresses universal themes. Among them are the demands of ultra-orthodox religion, which confines as it sustains, and the suffering of men and women whose religion comes before love, but whose culture lacks a vocabulary for expressing personal pain. Yet Kadosh is also foreign in the extreme, an austere and shocking portrait of daily life in Mea Shearim, the Hasidic Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. (...) Kadosh is a horror story, or rather two horror stories intertwined, about women tyrannised by men in the name of religious belief. » The Wall Street Journal, March 17th, 2000.