Fill the Void tells the story of Shira, a very devout Hasidic girl who is arriving at the point of her life where she is pressured into an arranged levirate marriage to an older widower, which is what happens in her community.
Beautiful and mysterious, the[se] first glimpses are an ideal primer for the Israeli film, which never rushes to spell out the meanings of its subtle and quiet moments.
A man and a woman, alone, on a path at night, forbidden to touch, speak, confront, describe passion: the man moves closer. That's all. The smallest of moves, infinitesimal motion. The world tilts on its axis.
[Burshtein] vividly depicts a clannish culture that is likely to feel foreign and perhaps off-putting to generations that came of age in a progressive post-feminist era.
Burshtein has achieved a gripping film without victims or villains, an ambiguous tragedy drawing on universal themes of love and loss, self-sacrifice and self-preservation.
As opposed to the bleak view of sexual subjugation in Kadosh, Amos Gitai's 1999 film about Hasidic marriage, Fill the Void sees Burshtein fortrightly and wittily asserting that this is how her community lives.
This is an extraordinary first film, nerve-tingling in its intensity, and assembled with a finesse and control even the great Austrian director Michael Haneke might envy.
