section Feature Film Competition

Pink Lady

  • Nir Bergman
  • IL, IT
  • 2024
  • 107

Bati and Lazer are happily married members of Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox community. That is, until blackmail photos surface in which Lazer is shown kissing another man. Bati helps her husband, does everything she can to keep the incident from going public and, at the same time, discovers an unfulfilled longing for sexual liberation within herself.

Everything would appear to be fine between Bati, a mikveh worker, and Lazer, a yeshiva student, the parents of three children. Then the photos confront Bati with an unexpected truth, putting the couple’s relationship under severe strain and calling into question what had hitherto appeared to be certainties. He is in debt and finds himself being blackmailed and terrorised by his creditors. Despite her deep insecurity and out of love for Lazer, Bati decides to help him – both in raising the money he needs and on the path, provided to homosexuals by the ultra-Orthodox community, towards "healing". And yet a new friend and the Pink Lady – a character from a pornographic comic strip – awaken in her an unfulfilled longing and a desire for liberation.
Director Nir Bergman brings to life here a moving story of a marriage trapped both by its own silence and religious rules. In doing so, he is heavily indebted to the outstanding performances of the two leading actors, Nur Fibak (Bati) and Uri Blufarb (Lazer), for the film’s ability to break down taboos without having to directly address them. A work about a deeply honest yet impossible love and about the taboos of a religious community.

Text: Merlin Webers


After the screenings in May 7th and May 8th there will be a Q&A with screenwriter Mindi Ehrlich.


Credits

original title Pink Lady

international title Pink Lady

german title Pink Lady

JFBB section Feature Film Competition

  • director Nir Bergman

country/countries IL, IT

year 2024

duration 107