A Thousand and One Wives

A Thousand and One Wives
A Film by: Michal Bat-Adam
(Israel, 1989, 93 Minutes, Color, Hebrew, English subtitles, Cast: Rita, Yossi Pollak, Nissim Azikri, Levana Finkelstein, Geula Nuni, Navah Ziv, Rivka Bahar, Yonatan Cherchy, Salim Dau, Etti Grottes)

The film depicts the married life of Naftali Siman-Tov, a fifty-year old widower whose two previous wives died under mysterious circumstances.
Convinced that a curse plagues his marriages, Naftali refuses to remarry, until pressure is exerted on him to wed a naïve young woman, Flora.

Naftali marries Flora, but his deep fear of the “evil eye” prevents him from fully consummating his marriage. The couple’s life gradually acquires a permanent flavor of unfulfilled love, but something is eating away at Flora, something she cannot identify until a textile dealer, Hamedian, seduces her.

Flora does not realize that she is pregnant, but Naftali grows more and more suspicious. Sunk in depression, Naftali, who longs for a child of his own, watches Flora bearing someone else’s child.

Divided by their failure to communicate with one another, and still more so by their lack of self-awareness, Naftali and Flora are both trapped within expectations dictated by society and tradition which ultimately transform their enchanted love story into a bitter traged.