Name: Ahot Zara
Genre: Drama
Released: 2000-12-28
Duration: 2 h 4 min
Rating: 6.4
Cast: Tamar Yerushalmi, Askala Marcus, Zvi Salton

There was so much promise in the first part of the film. That is, it seemed that in presenting the typically harried life of a working mother that we were going to get a big feminist statement, or better yet, a solution for this very widespread problem. But no, it turns out that the plight of illegal foreign workers is actually the main subject here and that part, the second half, is nicely done.

And it's really a shame that this opportunity to make a point for feminism was missed. I found it shocking that this mother, who is both loved and abused by her family, actually has a very high-ranking job in a bank. She is abused by her loving family in that she must wake up at 5:00 am, start the laundry, clean up the kitchen, run to the grocery store for breakfast food, and all while the husband and children are still sleeping. Then of course it's her job to see that they all wake up and get to where they need to go to on time. I won't go into all the details, but this goes on and gets worse as problems develop with her mother-in-law, and she is forced to hire an illegal foreign worker to help clean. I suppose using the word "abuse" here may seem harsh, but this "loving" family was unrelenting and selfish in their demands on this woman. I found their decision to send her on a weekend holiday in a hotel just as uncaring, and more to assuage their guilt than to address the real problem.

I was hoping that there would be a new way presented for women to break out of these roles of caretaker and cleaning woman and "good little wife", but nothing was ever done with this. The whole rest of the film revolves around the mother's new relationship with this foreign worker. It would have been better to make a documentary film about that very difficult human situation, and this film could have been a brilliant statement on the universal plight of women, if only we could have been offered a vision, a new way.

The directing was wonderful, sensitive, and unblinking when presenting poverty and injustice in the lives of these illegal workers. But I can't help but wonder why the larger, feminist issue wasn't fully addressed. Probably because the director is a man....

The drama genre is a broad category that features stories portraying human experiences, emotions, conflicts, and relationships in a realistic and emotionally impactful way. Dramas delve into the complexities of human life, often exploring themes of love, loss, morality, societal issues, personal growth, with the aim to evoke an emotional response from the audience by presenting relatable and thought-provoking stories.

Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)

Fifty-year-old Naomi is a woman who has everything, including a handsome husband and nice kids, but she is collapsing under the ordinariness of her successful life. She loses herself in the circle of housework and children. Just before the breaking point, she agrees to take Nigist, an Ethiopian Christian illegal worker, as a maid. The encounter between the two women channels Naomi's life in a new direction and exposes her to the world of migrant workers living among us. Paradoxically, parallels emerge between the problems of the two women, though their hardships have entirely different origins. This makes possible a temporary friendship between two women who represent two entirely different worlds. The events take place against the background of Israeli society, in which some 300,000 foreign workers live. Since the beginning of the 1980s, some 80,000 Ethiopian Jews have arrived in Israel. This unique wave of immigration attracted great public attention. Few are aware, however that among the workers who arrived to Israel from various African countries, there is also a community of several thousand Ethiopian Christians. The film Foreign Sister tells the story of this small and little known group.

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Foreign Sister

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