Eight Arab and Jewish women meet at a video production training course organised by their local council in Israeli director Orit Fouks Rotem’s groundbreaking debut feature Cinema Sabaya. Winner of Best Israeli Feature at the Jerusalem Film Festival 2021, the film is being shown on Sunday at the Phoenix, East Finchley as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival.

Inspired by Rotem’s own experiences as a film teacher working with groups of women in the town of Acre, Cinema Sabaya — a title Rotem says is an homage to Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 film Cinema Paradiso — deals with the daily life of women who have more in common than they could have ever imagined.

Although devised almost like a documentary, it is, in fact, a narrative film starring some of Israel’s most popular acting talent.

“I got the idea from my mother, who’s a consultant on women’s issues and who participated in one of these mixed groups,” Rotem tells me.

CINEMA SABAYA (UK Jewish Film Festival 2022) (03)

A scene from Cinema Sabaya

“It was a photography skills course for employees from Hadera, which is a Jewish city, which also included women from Arab towns and villages.”

What was it about that particular programme that really made her look into making a film about it?

“It was the fact that it’s only women, and the fact that they learn technical things on cameras.They observe their lives in a different angle and see themselves as the protagonists of their own lives.”

Rotem started doing research by running similar groups in a coexistence centre near her home town in the hope of understanding the other side and helping others do the same.

I’m intrigued about her own views of the other side whilst growing up. In her film, both sides are surprised about how little they know about one another despite living side by side for decades. Did she ever mix with the Arab Israelis or was that something that never crossed her mind? Was there a degree of fear of the unknown?

“I mean, I’m in the middle,” she tells me, adding: “I wasn’t raised to be afraid, but I wasn’t raised to be interested either.

"So I didn’t really know any Arab women until I got to film school. I knew that they existed, but I didn’t actually meet or have a deep relationship with an Arab woman or man until then. And, for me, the fact that we are afraid because we don’t know the other is the real tragedy.”

In the opening scene of the film, there is an awkward moment when one of her characters, a proud and feisty young Arab woman (played by Fauda star Aseel Farhat) is incensed at the fact that the whole group is expected, without even consulting them in advance, to converse solely in Hebrew.

It is a powerful exchange that immediately establishes where Rotem stands on the subject of equality.

“I wanted to put it on the table very fast,” she says. “And I wish I could do this film also half in Arabic half Hebrew, but the reality is not equal. And the reality is that there is discrimination. I don’t show the reality that I want to live in. I want to show actual reality.”

Despite its thorny subject matter, Rotem tells me that the reactions to her film have been mostly positive in Israel.

“I think that the power of the film is in the emotion, and people really connected with the characters and find themselves in the film, which is really amazing.”

Although her starting point was already a liberal, left-wing stance, I wonder if her experience working on a project like this has affected her political stance even further.

“From the beginning, I was on the left side of the map.

"But yeah, I think mostly by talking and hearing the feelings of my Arab actresses, I learned more about their pain and about their lives as Arab women in Israel, and I don’t think [my opinion] changed a lot, but it’s made it stronger.”

Cinema Sabaya is showing on 20 November as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival at the Phoenix, East Finchley