The Women's Balcony

Year: 2016

Actors: Igal Naor, Itzik Cohen

Duration: 96 min

The film opens with the neighborhood women, each bearing home-made dishes for a boy's bar mitzva celebration. Inside the synagogue, the men pray on the ground floor, while the women greet one another and orchestrate the proceedings from a balcony overlooking the men.Just as the celebrant is being called to ascend to the pulpit to read from the Torah scroll -- the actual bar mitzva ceremony -- the balcony collapses. Nearly all the women are injured, and the rabbi's beloved wife is knocked unconscious and slips into a coma. The Torah scroll is destroyed: a catastrophe.After a temporary prayer hall is procured, the men meet forlornly there each morning, trying to scrape up the needed quorum of ten needed for group prayer. As they're despairing, a young, energetic rabbi [Avraham Aviv Alush] appears with a dozen of his students, saving the situation.At first the men are grateful, but the new rabbi, with his charismatic preaching, begins pushing the congregants to extremes of observance, the primary target of which are the women. The tipping point occurs when he miraculously comes up with the money to rebuild the synagogue...sans the women's balcony. Both drama and comedy ensue.Meanwhile, unhinged by his wife being in a coma, the congregation's revered original rabbi descends into hallucinations and other mental illness symptoms, and spice shop owner Tziyon moves in to care for him. At the same time, Tziyon's niece, Yaffa [Yafìt Asulin], secretly starts to date Naphtali, one of the new rabbi's students, whom she met at a Passover seder reluctantly hosted by Tziyon and his wife, Margalit, who dislikes Rabbi David.At first Rabbi David makes inroads into the observance of some of the women, who in their newfound piety, turn against Margalit. But eventually Margalit organizes the women to resist Rabbi David's teachings, and along with her friend Ora [Sharon Elimelech], themselves raise the money needed to rebuild the women's balcony.The climax occurs when Rabbi David orders Naphtali to break up with Yaffa, declaring her unfit to marry any of his students, but Naphtali defies his rabbi and the film ends with Naphtali and Yaffa's wedding celebration.

Genre: Action   Comedy   Drama