When Israeli filmmaker Shirel Peleg met and fell in love with the woman she was to later marry, she was faced with a series of obstacles from her nearest and dearest — and not just because she was a gay woman in a country where same sex marriage is still unlawful. Peleg’s partner was not only not Jewish, but also German-born. The situation inspired Shirel’s brilliant debut feature as writer-director, the screwball comedy Kiss Me Kosher, which has been selected as part of this year’s UK Jewish Film Festival programme.
In the film, Fauda star Moran Rosenblatt plays Shira Shalev, a young Israeli gay woman who finds herself in a battle against her own family when she agrees to marry German born Maria (Luise Wolfram). Hilarity and much soul-searching ensues as the young women try to appease their loved ones, all the while wondering whether they have made the right decision.
On a Zoom call from her home in Germany, Peleg explains why she chose this particular subject. “It is just interesting for me to see how in our everyday life as Israelis, our past defines our present. It comes down to the way you make the most personal choices, even about who you want to marry. But in Israel it’s not just a personal issue — it’s a political issue, it’s a religious issue and historic issue. And I’m like, ‘Damn! I just fell in love, that’s basically all I did.’”
Born in Venezuela in 1985, Peleg is wryly adamant that she feels very little connection with the country in which she “just popped out” and never went back to. “My father comes from there originally and my mother is also from South America — you know the regular Jewish story! Their parents immigrated to Israel when they were children, then my parents met in the army, and then decided to try their luck in Venezuela with my father’s family […] I have very little connection with the place, except when I have to do any kind of bureaucracy because I have to get my birth certificate from Venezuela — and that’s hell on earth.”
Of her upbringing, she is insistent that her Jewish experience is very different from that of anyone who wasn’t brought up in the state of Israel, something that can confuse those who assume that being Jewish is the same for everyone. “The Israeli and the German takes are very different on these subjects. I get a lot of requests, from sensitivity reading to directing and writing offers — things that have to do with the Jewish community in Germany and I have to explain to them that I am an Israeli. I’m not a Jewish German, I’m not a Russian Jewish German. There are many categories to that — to them we’re all just Jews but it’s a lot more complicated than that.”
Kiss Me Kosher deals with, amongst other things, inherited trauma, the past and the future. I tell her that her decision to opt for a comedic tone is a stroke of genius. “I had the feeling that it’s a topic that’s being discussed all the time and never at the same time,” she replies. “We’re walking around it all the time, but not really touching it, and when we touch it we have a very specific way of doing so. At one point all of these issues became very relevant to me in my private life, and the absurdity of this… I found it mind-boggling it’s something that we talk about all the time, but we’re going nowhere. I definitely don’t think we need another film that has the same structures of the victims and victimisers, I can’t see that anymore.”
Albeit briefly, the film also touches on the thorny subject of the Israel Palestine conflict, which she broaches with commendable subtlety and nuance, mostly via the character of Ibrahim (played by Salim Dau), the not so secret lover of Shira’s Holocaust survivor grandmother Berta (Rivka Michaeli). “You know when you’re talking about Israel as an explosive place,” Peleg tells me, “you cannot ignore the Palestinian issue, even if Israel has been doing so forever. This is not me trying to say that we are doing to them what the Nazis did to us, because I really don’t believe that and I hope it doesn’t come across as that.”
Working in Germany as a writer-director seems to have opened a multitude of doors for this Israeli filmmaker who has a number of projects already under her belt. Peleg, however, becomes most excited when talking about her recent stint working on a feature-length episode of the cult German TV show, Tatort (Crime Scene). One of the most watched shows in Germany, this police procedural crime series has been running continuously since 1970 with around 30 feature-length episodes a year. “When you’re one of the lucky ones,” she tells me, “and get the phone call and they ask you to do it, you have to do it.”
Peleg has recently given birth to her first child, and is busier than ever, but making films isn’t something she ever saw herself earning a living from. “I did not have a Super 8 camera at the age of five,” she jokes. “For me it was a struggle the entire time. I cannot remember wanting to do anything else and I couldn’t remember thinking, like, it’s actually possible. It’s still the same even now — I mean this is how I make my living and feed my family, but still I feel, Is it happening, really?”
Kiss Me Kosher is part of the UK Jewish Film Festival programme, available from November 6 25th UK Jewish Film Festival runs 4-18 November ukjewish
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