The markets of Morocco sell everything to the sorcerer: hoopoe eyes, deer skin, chameleons, caged turtles and bones. Spice shops, between the jars, sell roots that promise everlasting desires. Salt and lead stones are also sold there, all of which are beautiful for treating the evil eye. How many eyes does Morocco put on life in it, and how many ways it has to remove them, because one must be especially careful if success comes, or if his name is praised some beautiful daughter was born.
Around the table that Grandma Esther filled with goodness, it was clear to everyone that the neighbors' evil eye was responsible for the fact that the cup of tea split in half as soon as the hot liquid touched it. It was the film crew who took their eyes out, and at once the room was filled with a frightened chorus of greetings, and they would all make atonement for their granddaughters who would soon be flying to Morocco.
A documented roots journey is at the center of the second season of "Periphery Empire," the series created by Orna Ben Dor in a joint production of "Endemol" and Moshe Edri and will premiere on Yes this coming Monday. This series follows the women of the periphery, who stand behind the world of beauty outside Tel Aviv.
The heroines of the second season of "Periphery Empire" in Morocco. A lesson on the world of classes, photo: Shai Scharf, courtesy of yes
When the eye went he entered the house of Charles Ohayon, who would be their guide on the journey to Morocco. He was born in Casablanca and now lives in Ashkelon, and knows exactly where on the map is Oujda, the city from which Naama's grandmother, Marioma, came from, who planted strength in her granddaughter in the divorce campaign she is going through this season. When it comes to the village where Uriah Azran's grandmother came from, Charles is a little less sure. But he knows the road beside the village and there is a hidden spring, to which she would slip away from her parents' house to meet Uriah's grandfather.
Grandma Esther was only 14 when they wanted to marry her, but she rebelled, insisting on her heart until everyone pleased. And now her granddaughter Uriah is looking at her with eyes bursting with pride, confident that from her she got the strength to insist on her path like this, from Ramla's caravan neighborhood to becoming a sought-after clothing designer with 250,<> followers and plenty in her bank account.
The first season also benefited Ortal Benisti's business, and not long ago they began selling duty-free cosmetics she developed. "Do you know the village of Azmor?" the grandmother asks Charles, and it is clear from the tone that she knows that the name she just threw into the room is a brand in the world of the tombs of the righteous.
Ortal wants to know if it's true everything Grandma told her about the grave of Rabbi Avraham Baal Haness, which catches fire if a Nida woman touches it, or fills with water when someone comes to cry at his place. But Charles compares and raises with miracles of his own. He knows the cemetery that has existed for 500 years and he knows the righteous. When his mother was young, she got paralysis in half of her face. The doctors said there was nothing they could do, so her mother immediately went with her to Azmour. That night, the righteous man slapped her in the dream, and she woke up healthy and smiling.
Ben Dor: "In every project there is this kind of strange infatuation, in which both sides are clear about what they get from the process. An infatuation that ends in a project. Here, with these girls, it feels a little different. I want everyone to love them, to see how powerful they are."
Later, in Morocco, when Charles sees Ortal's disappointment at the sight of the ancient cemetery, the face and face of the guard who follows the girls with a jug of water will also fall, which will be washed and scrubbed, bringing letters back to life perhaps, among which Ortal will find the name of her great-grandfather.
Not everything can be found in the Atlas Mountains or the sands of the Sahara, but how beautiful Morocco is in the eyes of the three protagonists, curious women who fall in love with the land of their fathers, energized by the walk left behind by their mothers. Revel in the excitement and pain of thickening the roots.
Eyelash soldering in Bnei Brak
"It was clear to me that this was a development of the second season," Orna Ben-Dor tells me as we sit at the dining table in her home in Jaffa. The launch will take place this evening. She hadn't written her speech yet, just had time to moisten eyelashes in Bnei Brak - a beauty routine that Ortal has introduced into her life and requires maintenance every month and a half. This filmmaker has known so many premieres and launches, that the amount of documentary work she has made is unimaginable, and her stomach still clenches. "I told yes I would do it under student conditions, but Morocco has to happen."
How much wisdom there is in the fabric of Ben Dor's story. In the ways in which she leads her heroines, whom they did not know before filming. She is in love with them all over her head, and did not expect that this way a strong bond would be forged between her heroines even outside of camera hours. From the outset, it was clear that such a series could benefit the girls' follower index and increase revenue for their businesses.
"On the one hand, I'm the most Israeli there is. Standing in Tel Aviv's traffic jams and everything peeling around, but I love this city. On the other hand, I feel like I should get out of here. The thought that Ben-Gvir is influencing in any way is incomprehensible."
She never imagined that this way they would look out for each other, forcing her to do without the docu-reality spice set, which includes quarrels and intrigue. Instead, her series grows some unusual female bonding, stigmatizing what female power looks and sounds like. A different kind of feminism, full of wit and humor.
"Manipulation is the way to make television," Ben-Dor once said in an interview. And she adds that anyone who thinks otherwise is either naïve or a little stupid. Ben Dor, who has specialized in docu-reality making in recent years, sees it as a natural development of the docu-worlds in which she grew up. She embraces the amount of viewers the genre brings, saying she loves the influence that comes with ratings.
"Every project has this kind of strange infatuation, where both sides are clear about what they're getting from the process. An infatuation that ends with the project. Here, with these girls, it feels a little different," she says, and when you watch her show, it's easy to see what she means. "I want everyone to love them, to see how powerful there is," she says – and knows full well that quite a few rough eyes want to compare these heroines to "Rich," the series she created for Channel 10 between 2014 and 2011, in which it focused on women who married wealthy men.
"When 'Empire' came out, there was a headline: 'Promised riches and brought them.' They didn't see that there were women here who had succeeded in their own right. True, it's not social justice, but it's a successful social story."
"Riches". A source for comparison with the current series, photo: Alex Lipkin
Walking in its own ways
Ben Dor, an artist devoid of purity, a gifted narrator who walks her own paths, challenges the cultural hierarchy in the subjects to which she chooses to point the camera. Used to the chirping sounds that accompany her choices. She says touching people's wounds is what drives her.
Through the cloud of perfume, sanctification of cultivation and preservation of the passon, moments grow in the periphery of the empire that grab the throat, teach a lesson about a class world that forces to listen to it for a moment. This lesson culminates in one of the scenes, where Uriah and Ortal go to meet Yaara Kedar, curator of the exhibition that was presented at Design Museum Holon and dedicated to the work of Albert Elbaz.
"The screener at the movie theater in Kiryat Ono was a friend of mine. I sat next to him just like in Cinema Paradiso and saw Doris Day, Westerns. From the age of 6, it was clear to me that I would be a director. I dreamed I would be Fellini. I didn't even know there was a docu in the world."
The meeting takes place after all the heroines visited the exhibition, from which they emerged dizzy from the names of the designers they created in his honor. All the biggest brands gathered in honor of the boy from Holon, who would peek out his window at his dog Shalom. "Years later, he was invited to a party held in the penthouse of his department store," Yaara tells the two, "and all he wanted to do at the party was find the window from which he peeked into the Shalom Tower."
The shrapnel from shattering the glass ceiling wounds Ortal when she tells Kedar how she enrolled in a preparatory program at Shenkar that cost far more than she could afford. "This place tells you don't dream," Ortal cries the burn of disillusionment that came with sums she had no chance of standing. And how, when she finished her day in the college's external studies, she would wander the halls of Shenkar to feel part of the dream. "I felt like I didn't deserve to be there, that I didn't meet the criteria."
Ben Dor. Presents in the series a different feminism, full of intellect and humor, photo: Avishag Shar-Yashuv
After that, Uriah will say that she wants to go inside, in depth, precisely from a place of success, that something will touch her. "To be a little scared and uncertain, like Albert said," Kedar replies. Ben Dor's camera knew so many stories, so many topics it touched on throughout its creative years. The girl who grew up in Kiryat Ono, across from a movie theater where Yona Wallach's mother was the cashier, and the movies changed every day.
"The projector was a friend of mine, and I would sit next to him just like in Cinema Paradiso and watch Doris Day, Westerns, see everything. From the age of 6, it was clear to me that I would be a director. I dreamed I would be Fellini. I didn't even know there was a docu in the world," she smiles, a beautiful woman who can't tell you that she'll soon be 70, neither in appearance nor in curiosity.
"Are you the divorced woman's child?"
She also remembers the transit homes of Kiryat Ono, and how she searched for the jubilation of families there that was not in her home. I remember the principal of the school who asked her to zip the button of her shirt and added, "Well, you're the divorced woman's child." And the best friend who one day Orna looked at her diary, and it said that she didn't know if she loved Orna more or felt sorry for her.
"All the women in my family are worried and sullen, Jewish like this," says Ben-Dor in "Mom, Tell," the film she made with Ami Tir in 2009, "as if a curse were placed on all of them. Such a sad fate. They all married a man who was their whole world and left them for other women. Great-grandmother Rosa, who came from an ultra-Orthodox family, desperately loved Grandpa Moses, who was both handsome and a sergeant major in the Austrian army.
"In the modest kitchen of the house, Rosa supported the family and also took care of her husband's unwanted pregnancies from other women. Rosa died young of heartbreak. My grandmother, Nettie Nechama, and Grandpa Adolf were 14 when they met and never parted. In the war, when the Russians occupied the city, they took Grandpa to Siberia. When the Nazis occupied the city, they took Grandma to the camps. What kept Grandma going all this time was that she would soon meet her beloved. Grandma survived and immigrated to Israel."
"When the series 'Periphery Empire' came out, there was a headline: 'Promised riches and brought them.' They didn't see that there were women here who had succeeded in their own right. True, it's not social justice, but it's a successful social story."
One morning, Ben Dor continues her story, she met a neighbor from a distant city and heard from her that her Adolf, who was sure she did not survive, had married another woman in Russia. "My grandmother died within three months of heartbreak. The doctors said it was cancer. My mother also had one man who left her heartbroken, my father, and although she married again and again, she couldn't get over the breakup. She, too, managed to overcome the cancer, but survived it. Maybe it's because medicine has advanced so far and knows how to fix a broken heart."
Two years of hell
And in this film, Ben Dor talks to her mother about the choice not to rehabilitate the demon that was amputated, touching the wounds of love for her father, who was 3 years old when he left home. Talking to her about the memory of the beatings they both suffered from Moshe Unterman, the man her mother married when Ben Dor was 5 years old only to prove that she too could marry, condemning herself and her daughter to two years of hell.
The camera was a doctor of souls, a generation talking to her mother about what stood between the two of them for a lifetime. In a soft melody, she asks her if she is happy with it, if she remembers calling her an ugly fat monkey. And how, when she danced at the end of the year with the other girls from the ballet class, her mother complimented the performance, until "suddenly I see some clumsy bear coming on stage, my daughter." And there is great generosity in the softness of the melody in which it is asked, and generosity in the courage with which she responds to her daughter who remembers everything, while she wishes to forget. The good that was taken and the bad that gripped her life.
And the heart goes out to both of them, to the daughter who wishes to lend a hand to the child she was, and to Jenny, who six years ago separated from the world and left behind a reconciled daughter.
"You don't understand how I miss her, call to ask her all kinds of questions. This is something that completely surprised me. The sadness and pain I suffered from her was so great, I thought her death would make it easier for me. After the film that reconciled us, she was very sick and I had been taking care of her for the past three years. Like a compassionate sister. It wouldn't have been possible without this film."
"I love Berlin and Los Angeles. In Berlin, the majority are immigrants and children of immigrants. It has a crazy culture scene that makes me happy. I might move among them and see my children and grandchildren more than once a year."
Both her parents were born in Czernowitz, the city on the banks of the Prut River, during the years when it still belonged to Romania. And like all the elites from there, they spoke German. So when they asked Orna where her parents came from, she would say they were Austrians, because novels were considered less. "My mother went through the war in the ghetto. My father, who was on the other side of the river, was taken to an extermination camp and survived. An educated man, a glorious communist." To him, Orna says, she owes her intellectual curiosity.
"He established the IDF's psychotechnical section. An IDF worker who would walk with an issue of 'This is the Way' tucked in his armpit, and didn't understand why he wasn't promoted through the ranks. Beautiful and cool man, but daddy's shit. He just wasn't. And when he did, he would beat me, especially when I got negative grades. Because just as I became beautiful in adolescence, I became a lesser student," she says. And I think about what a deal this is for a girl. In the years when Mom stops insulting her and starts complimenting her that she's beautiful, Dad starts beating her up with his disappointment.
Touching the Wounds of the Holocaust
More than once, her work touched on the wounds of the Holocaust. About "Because of That War" — the film that followed the production of "Ashes and Dust," the album by Yehuda Poliker and Yaakov Gilad that she directed in 1988 — she says is the film of her life. At its premiere, in front of hundreds of cheering people, Poliker screamed at her because the sound at the screening wasn't good enough. It freaked him out. And so, with one ticket, the audience received a documentary that will not be forgotten and a lovers' quarrel. Since then, Yehuda and she haven't exchanged a word, not even after she and Gilad spoke again.
Ben Dor with Poliker in the filming of "Because of That War" in 1988. Says it is "the film of her life", photo: Moshe Shai
She had two children from her marriage to screenwriter and writer Kobi Niv, which came to an end 30 years ago. The eldest, Uri, 41, is a lawyer in Los Angeles and a father of two children. Abigail, 34, went on an exchange student trip to Berlin, where she studied Talmud and was ordained as a Reform rabbi who heads a congregation.
In Berlin, she also met her future husband and had two children, "but I have a suitcase over my closet," she said in a recent interview. One suitcase above the closet in Berlin and the other in the thoughts of her mother, who is currently debating whether to leave the country. After more than 40 years, Ben Dor put her magnificent home in Jaffa up for sale.
At a screening of "Because of That War," in front of hundreds of people, Poliker screamed at her because the sound at the screening wasn't good enough. And so, with one ticket, the audience received a documentary that will not be forgotten and a lovers' quarrel. They haven't exchanged a word since;
"On the one hand, I'm the most Israeli there is. Even when I stand in Tel Aviv's traffic jams and everything peels away, I love this city. On the other hand, I feel like I should get out of here. The thought that Ben-Gvir is influencing in any way is incomprehensible. I open my eyes every morning and feel that this country is raping me. After all, Berlin or Los Angeles, both of which I love and feel at home in. Almost the entire class of Abigail from Thelma Yellin moved to Berlin. It is a progressive, liberal city, with an exciting intellectual and cultural life.
"It's not like I walk the streets and meet my family's murderers. The majority are immigrants and children of immigrants. It has a crazy culture scene that makes me happy. Both places are optional, and I may move between them and see my children and grandchildren more than once a year. It takes time to realize how difficult this separation is. At first, when the kids left, I was disgusted, I felt like I was a teenager. But then time passes and tartar spreads. It becomes the soul, and there is a very great longing. I love my children and I'm happy for my kids that they're not here."
Ben Dor in 2018. Extensive documentary work, photo: Moshe Shai
"There are no angels in the prosecutor's office"
And in the midst of the hustle and bustle of thoughts, she sees how supporters of the legal coup make use of excerpts from "The Law of Souls," the series she created for Channel 10 in 2016. Like most of her works in recent years, she was photographed by her lover, Shimi Gat. This is a series that plunged into the ills of the State Attorney's Office.
"Attorney Avigdor Feldman told me that just as in every conviction two policemen come and take the defendant out of court, he dreams of two angels who will lead him away when he is acquitted. But it just never happens. There is no chance for angels in the prosecution. I think that if the coup passes, in a while we will not be able to conduct an interview like the one we are holding now, and a person will be able to find himself transferred from cell to cell without explanation. We are on the brink of disaster. The State Prosecutor's Office is Mom and Daddy's place, but right now I'm pinning all my hopes on it."
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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