Keep Not Silent
(Et She-Ahavat Nafshi)
Directed by Ilil Alexander
Distributed by Women Make Movies
“It’s a very small community, and if anyone finds out that I have anything to do with you or with this film about lesbians, it’s going to ruin the lives of my kids.”
So begins Keep Not Silent (Et She-Ahavat Nafshi), Israeli filmmaker Ilil Alexander’s award-winning first feature documentary. The film documents three Orthodox Jerusalemite women brought together by a support group, OrthoDykes, whose lives as lesbians – either top secret or relatively open – have been cause for personal and familial discord.
Through a series of personal interviews and rabbinic disputes mediated by blurred faces, changed identities, and opaque curtains, we gain a privileged glance into a world-within-a-world. Though eventually tired, the technique of shooting through veils and windows visually conveys a community hidden from American and Israeli communities alike.
“Miriam-Esther,” the first of our three protagonists, has suppressed her same-sex desire for 20 years, during which time she married and mothered 10 children. “Ruth” married despite her interest in women, then fell into a deep depression. She and her husband worked out an exceptional arrangement: she would spend two nights a week with her girlfriend, and the rest as his wife and mother of their four children. “Yehudit” left the community after falling in love with a woman, and struggles with both rabbinic and parental condemnations of same-sex love.
While peppered by debates recognizable by same-sex couples everywhere, the women’s struggles are unique to their religious commitments. Yehudit and Tal quibble about their upcoming commitment ceremony: who should break the glass, as is traditional for the bride to do? “Are you a man? Am I a man? That’s ridiculous!” exclaims Tal.
Though the approach of the film is resolutely personal, we are kept at an uninspiring arm’s length from the protagonists and their struggles. Keep Not Silent only hints at larger questions without asking them, and even fails to clarify some of its central plotlines: What is OrthoDykes and how does it function for them? How do our protagonists feel about secular, socially progressive Israel, where their queer sides would be respected, though possibly to the exclusion of their religious ones? What do they think about the gay pride movement?
The film’s penultimate strokes take us to the Jerusalem pride parade, where participants and protestors try to outdo each other with their Jewish literacy. Marchers carry a banner proclaiming “God created me according to his will,” and fundamentalists yell about wasted sperm delaying the messiah. As the view switches to Miriam-Esther covering her hair at the end of an interview, she represents all three women, occupying the margins of both camps, hidden from all.
