The House on Chelouche Street

The House on Chelouche Street
The House on Chelouche Street
	Film poster
Directed by	Moshé Mizrahi
Written by	Rachel Fabien ; Yerech Guber ; Moshé Mizrahi
Produced by	Yoram Globus (executive producer) ; Menahem Golan (producer)
Starring	Gila Almagor
Cinematography	Adam Greenberg
Edited by	Dov Hoenig
Music by	Dov Seltzer
Release date	1973;
Running time	110 minutes
Country	Israel
Languages	Hebrew ; Egyptian Arabic ; Ladino

The House on Chelouche Street (Hebrew: הבית ברחוב שלוש, romanized: HaBayit b'Rechov Shalosh) is a 1973 semi-autobiographical film by Israeli director Moshé Mizrahi, who also co-wrote the screenplay. It was filmed in Hebrew, Egyptian Arabic and Judeo-Spanish (a.k.a. Ladino, a Jewish language mostly derived from Old Castilian). The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.^[1]

Plot

The film tells the story of a Sephardi family of Egyptian Jewish immigrants from Alexandria that settle in 1947 Tel Aviv. The family consists of a 33-year-old widowed wife, Clara, (played by Gila Almagor, one of the most prominent actresses in Israel for the last three decades) and her four children. They live in a working-class neighborhood surrounded by their extended family, including Clara's mother Mazal, Clara's uncle Rafael, and Sultana, his wife.

The plot centers on the firstborn, Sami, his transition from a shy 15-year-old to a working man and an activist in the "Irgun" (a resistance movement that acted mainly against the military forces of the British), and the romantic attachment he develops with a 25-year-old Russian immigrant librarian (Michal Bat-Adam, now a director). In addition to this, Clara struggles between social pressure to take a husband and her own complex feelings surrounding this, complicated by another Sephardi Egyptian, played by Yosef Shiloach, who has strong feelings for her.

The film is a vivid and very credible description of the lives of Sephardi immigrant families on the eve of the declaration of the state of Israel. Also covered are the escalating violence between British forces and the local populace, as well as Palestinian Arab violence towards Jews.