Cinema reflects our inner world

Marek S. Bochniarz

“Cinema Reflects Our Inner World”

Translation from Polish:

On 20 July 2025, during the 42nd edition of the Jerusalem Film Festival, the Israeli premiere of Houses took place — the feature-length debut of Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum, a Jewish artist of Ukrainian origin who creates and lives in Israel. Earlier that same year, in February, the film had its international premiere at the 75th Berlinale.

There, in the Forum section, Houses was screened alongside Eva Neymann’s documentary When Lightning Flashes Over the Sea, a film about the everyday lives of Odessa’s residents during the ongoing war with Russia, in which Russian and Ukrainian intermingle with Yiddish.

The central figure of Houses is Sasha — a short-haired non-binary person of Eastern European background. As an adult, they embark on a journey through the titular places in which they lived with their migrant family during childhood and adolescence. During this “second” journey — one that simultaneously unfolds inward, into memory and the retrieval of recollections — Sasha, a person in constant motion, suspended in-between, spending time in transitional spaces, usually sleeps in a car. They repeatedly leaf through a diary containing collages, drawings, clippings, quotations — a record of the road towards adulthood, full of cultural discoveries (idols such as Anne Frank, David Bowie, the beloved Michael Jackson), “revelations”, reflections. In it they find, for instance, the following words: “I know that Misha is not my real father. Why does Mum keep lying to me?” While spending time in the forest, they write: “None of these houses were ever mine. Twenty years have passed and I still think about the words spoken by Great-Grandmother Dvorah: ‘Perhaps everything we were waiting for has already happened.’” They then develop this thought further: “A home has no meaning if it is not inhabited. A body has no value if we do not identify with it. A heart has no peace if there is no love.” Can this renewed, almost ritualistic passage through houses and memories, while simultaneously encountering new inhabitants, truly bring Sasha peace?

“If we had to define them, then non-binarity is probably the most appropriate description. But the best way is not to define them at all. They exist in-between — between identities, genders, states of mind… between homes, languages, jobs. They are migrant and permanently nomadic,” explains Tetelbaum.

In the film, we observe how Sasha’s self-identification is repeatedly questioned. Contemporary black-and-white shots are juxtaposed with colourful video recordings — amateur family films in which Sasha, as a child, is drilled by the father holding the camera, trained to be a “proper girl”. Years later, when they visit their former primary school, they introduce themselves as a boy and attempt to find out what happened to Guy Shimoni, who was a few years older, showing a shared old photograph. They then hear from the secretary, who scrutinises them closely, “You look good with long hair,” and learn that in the meantime the institution had briefly become a yeshiva before being transformed once again into a public school — and that the archives from the 1990s no longer exist. “The town hall may have documents from when you were a girl,” the woman announces with perfidy, to which an irritated Sasha replies, “I don’t like being called a girl,” before storming out, slamming the door.

Particularly painful is the meeting towards the end of the film with Sasha’s mother Nina and grandmother. The former is unable to accept that Sasha does not perceive themselves as a girl. When she misgenders them and is told how to address them, she shouts furiously, “They’re correcting me on how to speak to them? You little monster. Are you going to tell me what I gave birth to?”, to which Sasha responds, “Apparently it’s not enough just to give birth.” And yet, in the finale, reconciliation takes place between them. Sasha is once again on the road — this time with their beloved, an older woman named Anna, whom they met in one of the former “houses”.

Before the screening at the Jerusalem festival, the director delivered a short speech in which, alongside thanking the crew, she articulated a kind of statement on how she perceives cinema as an art form:

In my view, cinema is the art that best reflects our inner world.It possesses an extraordinary power to activate most of our senses through the way it works with time, movement, and sound — and thus, without needing many words, and sometimes without words at all, it creates a sense of reality that reveals the deepest secrets of our souls.I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to study this art, to learn through it, to create with its help — and to communicate with all of you through it.

The film Houses is a journey of a lifetime — a decade-long process made up of endless fragments of memory, revisions, reflections, images, beginnings and endings — a journey into the past that made the present somewhat more bearable. And although this present continues to impose harsh physical and cultural conditions for survival, I must say this: through working on Houses, I learned that everything is possible when the people around you come together in the name of a shared passion and purpose.That is the power of art.The power of creation — to bring people closer together, to expand awareness, to help us understand why we live. Or perhaps not so much to explain, but simply to pose the question — and perhaps to give it form and hold it together. This is precisely what happened during the making of this film.

At the Jerusalem Festival, Houses unfortunately did not receive any award or distinction. On the one hand, it would not be incorrect to say that Tetelbaum belongs to a group of new female voices in Israeli cinema that were particularly noticeable during last year’s edition of the festival — in terms of debuting and developing female directors (Milk Road by Maya Kenig, Maya Dreifuss’s second film Highway 65), or intriguing, unconventional female characters (Come Closer by Tom Nesher, Tropicana by Omer Tobi). All of these films, however, fit stylistically within artistic mainstream cinema, commonly present at international film festivals and art-house cinemas.

Against this backdrop, the extraordinarily refined, poetic, meditative, and mysterious Houses resists such easy labelling and assimilation into contemporary cinematic trends. There is no calculation in it, no submission to passing fashions, no attempt to be “of the moment”. The monochromatic, exquisitely composed wide frames, the unhurried narrative tempo, and the ambivalence of the main character give this moving, beautiful work the spirit of the French New Wave. Hence — if it were at all possible to compare it to any Israeli production — then, for lack of a better point of reference, I would suggest The Siege by Gilberto Tofano from 1969. The heroine of that unjustly forgotten film is a young widow of a soldier killed in war who refuses to submit to social norms and avoids the corset of martyrdom. She wishes — horror of horrors! — to enjoy life, choosing romance and small pleasures instead of a heroic role. From world cinema, Houses is very close to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky — if only in the way Tetelbaum, with the help of long takes, conveys the protagonist’s immersion in time, in duration, in the here-and-now, in experiencing and living the world.

Houses, dir. Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum42nd Jerusalem Film Festival 20.07.2025

The article in Polish by Marek S. Bochniarz for Miasteczko Poznań magazine

https://miasteczkopoznan.pl/blog/kino-oddaje-nasz-wewnetrzny-swiat/