— BY Rama Burshtein
Fill the Void tells the story of an Orthodox Hassidic family from Tel Aviv. Eighteen-year-old Shira is the youngest daughter of the family. She is about to be married off to a promising young man of the same age and background. It is a dream-come-true, and Shira feels prepared and excited. On Purim, her twenty-eight-year-old sister, Esther, dies while giving birth to her first child. The pain and grief that overwhelm the family postpone Shira’s promised match. Everything changes when an offer is proposed to match Yochay – the late Esther‚Äòs husband – to a widow from Belgium. Yochay feels it’s too early, although he realizes that sooner or later he must seriously consider getting married again. When the girls’ mother finds out that Yochay may leave the country with her only grandchild, she proposes a match between Shira and the widower. Shira will have to choose between her heart’s wish and her family duty.
A devout 18-year-old Israeli is pressured to marry the husband of her late sister. Declaring her independence is not an option in Tel Aviv’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community, where religious law, tradition and the rabbi’s word are absolute.
Rama Burshtein (Director) was born in New York, USA in 1967. She graduated the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, Jerusalem in 1994. During those years Rama became deeply religious and upon her graduation she dedicated herself to promoting film as a tool for self expression in the orthodox community. Rama wrote, directed and produced films for the orthodox community, some of them for women only. She was also teaching directing and scriptwriting in various film and television institutions within the orthodox community; those include Ma’ale Film School, Yad Benjamin Film School for Woman, Ulpena Arts School, Jerusalem. Fill the Void is her first feature film.
