The Result of an Immigrant's Life Experience.

Translation from Russian.

In the “Forum” section of the recent Berlin Film Festival, the premiere of the film Houses by Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum took place. The film follows Sasha, a non-binary character who refers to themselves in the masculine, returning from Tel Aviv to Safed, where they lived with their family, in search of an old acquaintance. Sasha is attempting to find answers to painful questions that hinder their ability to live.

The director of the film, Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum, was born in Kharkiv in 1984 and emigrated to Israel with her family when she was six. A graduate of the Lee Strasberg Institute of Theater and Film in New York and the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem, she worked as an actress in Israeli cinema before Houses, her debut feature film.

Irina Karpova spoke with her about the debut movie and the long journey to its audience.

Irina Karpova: At the beginning of the film, the protagonist arrives in Safed (a city in northern Israel, one of the religious centers of the country. – Ed.) and enters a semi-abandoned house. What inspired the choice of this city and such a location?

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: I chose to shoot the film in Safed primarily because it was the city we moved to when we arrived in Israel from the former Soviet Union. We lived there for three years and changed apartments three times. Aside from the fact that this is a biographical detail that, of course, holds sentimental value for me, Safed is a very interesting and rather strange city. It combines many historical layers (it is considered a global center of Kabbalah), and its population is made up of very religious people, new immigrants from Russia and Ethiopia, and artists.

Even though the city is one of the oldest in Israel and a major tourist center for spiritually-minded people, it is a peripheral city, and every year it becomes more religious and abandoned. It is located between the Golan Heights, with valleys and hills, surrounded by forests, remote and mysterious. There’s something in its eclectic landscapes, in this combination of holiness and everyday life, in its fogginess, that has always attracted me and seemed fitting for the character of Sasha.

Irina Karpova: In Israel, many different types of films are made, but at the Berlin Film Festival, almost all films from Israel are in one way or another connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Houses is a rare film that does not touch on this subject. Did you conceive of it as a space where one could take a pause and rest from the war?

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: Honestly, I wrote the screenplay without thinking at all about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though I’m sure that this conflict, in one way or another, shapes the souls of those living in Israel and Palestine, with or without it. This endless conflict has permeated all of us. But the character of Sasha, the protagonist of the film, has their own war, one that takes precedence over everything else. They are a persecuted character, and they embark on this journey with the hope of perhaps freeing themselves, at least a little, from the demons of their past and finding some semblance of peace—or perhaps even their inner home.

Moreover, if we’re talking about the conflict and Israeli cinema, just recently, a law was passed in the Israeli Film Council, according to which arthouse films, or films that are not pro-Israeli, or films that are not intended for a broad audience from the start (meaning mainstream films that cater to the audience), will no longer be considered for state support. It seems that Houses was the last arthouse film to receive support from Israel’s film funds, and even this one I had to shoot over nine years due to significant difficulties in securing funding. In the end, it was only thanks to the faith of the last true believers (in the major Israeli film fund) that art is an important cultural heritage, that I was able to gather a quarter of the necessary budget.

Irina Karpova: Are these difficulties somehow related to the fact that your film includes an LGBT storyline?

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: I think it's all intertwined. Of course, the film touches on queer identity, but I believe the main difficulty stems from the fact that films like mine are harder for audiences to process because of their cinematic language—how the film communicates with the audience. Today, viewers are accustomed to watching series or films where the shots are very short. If you notice, frames today are edited almost every six to ten seconds, and the plot is typically conveyed through continuous dialogue. People are so accustomed to this that they can't perceive things differently, and they lose focus and interest.

Irina Karpova: I want to ask you about the queer element in the film. We often see complex portrayals of relationships on screen, where the characters suffer, trying to understand themselves and tormenting each other. In Houses, however, there’s another perspective, with the relationship between two people based on acceptance, where sexuality doesn’t become a battleground of pain.

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: First of all, I’ll start by saying that love is a terrifying thing (laughs), and it really does make people sometimes lose themselves and behave in unusual ways. But in this case, I think Houses is not a film about romantic relationships. It does offer a version of a relationship, but we don’t end up going down that path.

I think the film is about self-discovery and about Sasha's attempt to allow themself to be present in reality, to perhaps become someone capable of loving and being loved.

Irina Karpova: Your film contains many radical elements: the protagonist is a non-binary character, there’s a theme of sexualized violence, complex relationships with a controlling mother, and so on. Yet, it is also a poetic film, almost like a dream. This makes one reflect on the politics of identity. It seems that radicalism often emerges when we apply labels to a person or phenomenon.

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: Yes, I understand. People love to define everything. We think that if we give something a name, we can control phenomena or certain aspects of our soul or behavior, and in this way, we can “normalize” everything into a balanced state that is comfortable and understandable for everyone. I feel that this is pointless because a person’s soul and their experience of themselves and the world are so subjective and impossible to replicate. What is so powerful about art is that it’s the only format through which we can create and share something that comes close to the lived experience of the subject. That’s what I was trying to do in my film with Sasha—I tried to reflect their inner world through cinema.

Irina Karpova: The role of the mother was played by the renowned Israeli theater actress Evgenia Dodina. How did she come to be in your film?

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: Evgenia is simply an incredible, amazing actress and a remarkable woman. I’ve always wanted to work with her. Beyond her virtuosity and strength as an actress, she always reminded me of my own mother—something in her temperament, very similar. When I was writing the script, I told myself that only Evgenia Dodina could play my mother.

Irina Karpova: In the film, the representatives of two generations—mothers and children—literally and figuratively speak different languages: the mother speaks Russian, and Sasha replies in Hebrew. How did this eloquent metaphor come about?

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: I think this is the result of the immigrant’s life experience. To some extent, it’s one of Sasha’s traumas, which shaped their fluid identity. This experience of living “in between”—between languages, between homes, between man and woman, between past and present... I can speak from my own experience as someone who emigrated to Israel at the age of six, that I don’t have a native language. Unfortunately, I don’t feel completely confident in any of the languages I speak: neither Russian, nor Hebrew, nor English. Maybe that’s why I’ve always gravitated toward expressing myself through images.

Irina Karpova: You were born in Kharkiv, but I understand you don’t speak Ukrainian?

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: I understand a little Ukrainian, but yes, in our family, we always spoke Russian, and my mother and grandmother also spoke Yiddish. As I understand it, now everyone speaks Ukrainian there.

Irina Karpova: In Vitaly Mansky’s documentary The Eastern Front, the characters talk about how Kharkiv was populated with Russian-speaking specialists during Soviet times in order to push the Ukrainian language out of the city. Now, because of the war, more and more Ukrainians are distancing themselves from the Russian language, even if they grew up speaking it.

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: I understand that... I don’t know what to say. I’m for freedom, equality, independence, and peace. I thought that over time, we would learn from our mistakes and try to improve—but unfortunately, it’s the opposite. And it’s so difficult.

I’ll quote a woman I really love, who says that if women were given just five years to run the world without men, the world would be a better place. And at least because women are not interested in wars and bloodshed. It’s not in their DNA.

Irina Karpova: Let’s return to the language issue. Is it true that your mother refused to speak to you in Hebrew?

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: Yes. My mother still refuses to speak to me in Hebrew; she doesn’t want me to forget Russian, and in a way, I’m grateful to her for that. Though it’s not always easy for me. It seems that my parents still don’t feel like Israelis. In any case, in the film, there is a language barrier between Sasha and her mother, which, as already mentioned, also reflects the cultural rift between them. The mother tries to pull Sasha toward her own perspective, to the images she wants to see in her, but Sasha resists it.

Irina Karpova: “Houses” is a reflection on the trauma of the immigrant, but there are very few films on this topic. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Give Me Liberty (2019) by Kirill Mikhankovsky. Do you think perhaps it’s only now that millennials are ready to confront their traumas head-on?

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: I haven’t seen that film yet, but I’ll try to find it. I think that only now, migrants of my generation—at least those who left after the collapse of the Soviet Union—are starting to talk about this. It could have happened earlier if our world hadn’t become so capitalist. As I mentioned, it took me nine years to make this film. But in any case, what I want to say is that, yes, processing trauma takes time, and for me, this film is a sort of psychoanalytic journey. In general, art has this particular characteristic, and I feel fortunate to have found this connection in my life.

For me, art is a way of expressing the meaning of life, and it has saved my life more than once, making me feel like I am a part of this world.

Irina Karpova: Your film feels like a dream, and the protagonist, searching for answers in childhood events, inevitably evokes a comparison with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Can you tell us about the directors who influenced you?

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum: Yes, of course, Tarkovskey. Tarkovskey is my spiritual mentor; I know his works by heart. I also really love Robert Bresson, Abbas Kiarostami, Bergman, Antonioni, Bela Tarr—generally, I love poetic cinema. Recently, I watched a stunning film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul called Memoria. I haven’t seen such good contemporary cinema in a long time. I think what unites these directors is that their work creates a completely different experience of time—one that is very unique, subjective, and very specific. And the more specific this experience is, the more it endures the test of time and stays with us forever. Like Da Vinci, like Bach.

https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/03/08/rezultat-zhiznennogo-opyta-immigranta