ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: What relationship do women in the ultra-Orthodox community in Tel Aviv have with the arts?
Rama Burshtein was born in New York in 1967 and grew up in Tel Aviv. She graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem. At the age of twenty-five, she embraced Orthodox Judaism and began to write, direct and produce films for the Orthodox community, primarily for women. She has taught directing and screenwriting in various film and television schools within the Orthodox community, including the Ma’ale Film School, the Yad Benjamin Film School for Women and the Ulpena Arts School in Jerusalem, and she is a member of a collective of Orthodox women filmmakers. Her first feature-length film, Fill the Void, is set in a family from the Orthodox Hassidic Jewish community. At the 2012 Venice Film Festival it won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress with the debut performance of Hadas Yaron and it also won seven Ophir Awards, the Israeli equivalent of the Oscars. The film premiered in Spain at the Barcelona and Madrid Jewish Film Festivals in June, and opened here commercially on July 25.
