Halisa, a new film by Sophie Artus, which opened in theaters around Israel on Thursday, is a moving, complex film that looks at a childless nurse working in a pediatric clinic in a mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood in Haifa.
It’s a movie that may sound bleak but mixes vivid, appealing characters struggling with real issues – loneliness, single motherhood, fighting against a bureaucracy where many people fall through the cracks – to tell a story that is engrossing and also highlights social issues in a non-preachy way.
It stars Noa Koler, one of Israel’s best and most versatile actresses, whom you may know from her comic turn as the annoyingly earnest supermarket manager in Checkout, but who has been excellent in many other series and movies, including Fire Dance and The Wedding Plan.
In Halisa, Koler plays Sara, a nurse in a children’s (Tipat Halav) clinic who has a stressful workload and also faces the pressure that comes with the fertility treatments she is doing. Although her backstory is very understated, the 40-something Sara is divorced and realizes that if she wants children, it’s now or never. The clinic she works in is in the low-income neighborhood of Halisa, where Arabs, Jews, new immigrants, and foreign workers live side by side, just trying to get by.
Early in the film, she meets a mother who refuses to remove all her baby’s clothes for an exam, and as they talk, the mother becomes confrontational over a bruise on the baby, raising Sara’s suspicions that all is not right in their home. As she hears more, she becomes concerned that the woman’s daughter may be the victim of abuse. The story of this family continues throughout the film, and it is emblematic of the kinds of complicated situations Sara has to deal with daily.
At home, she barely has the energy to do more than take her hormone shots for her IVF treatment. As the story unfolds, two new important figures come into her life.
Two stories
The first is Anya (Dana Berkovich), a young Russian woman who is living in a substandard apartment, really a hole in the wall, with her new baby and her partner, a young Arab mixed up in crime. Anya is having trouble caring for the child’s basic needs. Her loneliness mirrors Sara’s, and the two women bond. When it looks like Anya may leave the country soon and doesn’t want to bring the baby along, Sara begins to think about trying to adopt the child.
The second person who begins to change Sara’s life is Anatoliy (Anatoliy Belyy), a handyman who begins fixing up her apartment in anticipation of the baby she hopes she will give birth to if the treatments work.
ALL OF these elements come together in a graceful drama that is well paced and beautifully acted. It also has a strong feeling of authenticity, which Artus said in a recent interview came from the extensive research she did while writing the script.
Artus, who made her acclaimed first film, Valley, about troubled teenagers in a small town a few years ago, later moved to Haifa with her husband and became interested in the Halisa neighborhood.
“When I got to Haifa, I started to do research for an idea I had, about a pediatric nurse who is doing fertility treatments, who works all day with babies and children and she herself is trying to have a child and has failed so far,” Artus said.
“I met a psychologist to talk to about the story, and she introduced me to Halisa. I wanted to set the story in a neighborhood that would be interesting, and Halisa is a mixed neighborhood with an underprivileged population. Mothers there face lots of challenges, including poverty and crime… I like to take marginal characters and put them in the center.”
She began to spend time in the neighborhood and to consult with the staff of the new baby clinic there, who provided valuable help for the film. Many of the characters and situations are amalgams of real people she met and stories she heard there.
French-born Artus has an unusual background for a director. She studied neurobiology in France and in Israel, but also pursued acting. Once she was in Israel, she decided that her language skills weren’t up to acting in Hebrew. After that, she began to study photography and eventually filmmaking. For a while, she continued to do biological research and taught biology but eventually chose to concentrate on filmmaking full time.
While her life experience is very different from that of the mothers who bring their children to the baby clinic in Halisa, Artus said that she was able to identify with them and bring some of her own experiences into her writing.
“A nurse at the baby clinic I went to with my child understood that we are alone in Israel, we have no family here… She asked me so many questions, I couldn’t understand why. One day she wanted to weigh the baby and she told me to take off all his clothes, including the diaper.
“The baby began to cry and my other son began to fuss, and I said, ‘Instead of taking off everything, why don’t you just weigh him and subtract a little for the weight of the diaper?’ And she said, ‘No, Sophie. I want to see him. I want to check that he’s okay.’ And I saw that her role is much deeper than seeing how much he weighs. That she wants to see if the baby is really being taken care of, if the whole family is all right.”
The nurse invited her to a support group for new mothers in the neighborhood. While Artus was skeptical at first, it helped her personally and gave her ideas that she developed in the movie.
“I COMPLETELY identify with Sara, but also with the mothers in the film,” she said. In one instance in the movie, a baby is taken away from a struggling, unfit mother, which has tragic consequences.
“Sara does what she is required to by law; she can help the baby, but she can’t give the mother the help that she needs, too.” Artus said she was fascinated by the dilemmas and conflicts that both staff and mothers at the clinic faced daily.
She has high praise for her lead actress, who was a real collaborator on the film. “Even before the film received financing, I sent the script to Noa Koler, who immediately fell in love with it. Noa became kind of my cinematic alter ego; we were in perfect symbiosis. We’ve never seen Noa before the way she is in Halisa.”
The key role of Anya is Dana Berkovich’s first role, and the director thought it was a sign that she has the same last name as the character. Anatoliy Belyy is a big star in Russia, Artus said, “a kind of Russian Tom Cruise.” He fled Russia due to the war and had only been in Israel about six months before he was cast. In spite of knowing little Hebrew, he was able to memorize and recite the dialogue convincingly.
Artus said she had a parallel journey to Sara’s when making the film, creating a kind of family with the actors, just as Sara does when Anya, Anatoliy, and their families come into her life.
“Sara realizes that whether she can give birth to a child or not, she can have love in her life, and she can create a family with the people around her,” Artus said, echoing the movie’s theme of redemption through love and community.