The Black Bus
By Symi Rom-Rymer
Anat Zuria has made her career exploring the stories of religious women on the margins of their world. Her latest work, The Black Bus, a selection at the recent New York Jewish Film Festival, is no exception. In this probing documentary, Zuria focuses her attention on the wrenching displacement of Sara Enfield and Shulamit Weinfeld, two young women who have left the Jerusalemite haredi world of their upbringing. They may have physically left their ancestral community but they struggle to fully escape its influence. Einfeld, divorced with two young children, is a writer whose blog, A Hole in the Sheet, lays bare her experiences as an ultra-Orthodox woman. Weinfeld is a photographer and law student who left her family only weeks before the shooting of the documentary.
What the film does best is allow...