I would like to discuss four documentaries directed by women, which bring to life untold stories from the early days of Israel till now, sharing the same theme - women’s struggle. The films offer a new type of sensitivity and empathy, adopt a “feminine gaze” and generate “visibility” and “audibility” for those ignored by the hegemony (Munk 2011). Edna Politi’s Anou Banou: The Daughters of Utopia (1983) engages with the memories of the first Zionist women pioneers, who had emigrated from Eastern Europe with the hope of playing a role in the building of a new society, only to discover that Zionism was not an egalitarian as it claimed (ibid.). Similarly Michal Aviad’s Women/Pioneers (2013) gives voice to women pioneers through their journals. Writing about themselves, they described their fight for equality and protested against their silencing. Another documentary by Aviad - Dimona Twist (2016) - focuses on women who arrived from North Africa and Poland in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s and were sent from their ship to the desert. They discuss the pains of immigration and poverty, and their determined attempts to resist patriarchal constraints.
Recently women’s documentaries have adopted a more personal, often autobiographical, mode. Moran Ifergan, a daughter of immigrants from North Africa, chooses to tell her story with her unique cinematic language in The Wall (2017). Camera in hand, she spends one year inside the women’s section of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, filming religious, military, and national rituals on the site. While the visuals are charged with symbolism, the unsynchronized audio track is composed of recorded phone calls from friends and family, uncovering her pain and doubts as her marriage falls apart. Ifergan’s subversive use of a sacred space accentuates the power hierarchies at play in her struggle for autonomy and self-determination. Thus The Wall, though very personal, is part of a growing group of films that gives voice to women who dare to challenge the “old world.”