Shlomi Elkabetz

Shlomi Elkabetz was born in Beersheba's Neighborhood D to parents who had immigrated from Morocco.[3] When he was six years old, the family relocated to Kiryat Yam, a city in the Krayot area north of Haifa.[3] His sister Ronit was eight years his senior, and his earliest memory of her dated to when he was three: he was injured on a balcony, and she ran inside to bring a cloth and wipe the blood from his leg.[7] He later reflected, "In every memory I have of Ronit, she is very present in it."[7]

After completing military service, Elkabetz traveled in the Far East before moving to New York City, where he lived for seven years.[3] During that period he studied acting and performed in theater, and it was there that he began writing the screenplay that would become To Take a Wife, the first film he would make with Ronit.[3] He returned to Israel in 2000.[3]

Elkabetz's filmmaking career is defined above all by his collaboration with Ronit Elkabetz. The siblings co-wrote and co-directed a trilogy of narrative features centered on Viviane Amsalem, a Mizrahi Israeli woman of Moroccan background.[1][3] Elkabetz described their creative process as an unusually close bond — a "creative entity" — in which they wrote and worked together in the same room, often for long, concentrated periods, drawing on shared family memories before moving toward issues of broader public significance.[3][7]

The first film, To Take a Wife (2004), studies three days in Viviane's life as she faces family pressure to remain an obedient wife while wanting more autonomy.[4] The second, Seven Days (2008), follows a Moroccan family gathered in one house after the death of one of the brothers.[3] The concluding installment, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, takes place almost entirely inside a small rabbinical courtroom and follows Viviane through years of hearings as her husband refuses to grant her a divorce.[8][9] Ronit Elkabetz played Viviane throughout the trilogy.[1]

Gett premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where its performances and deliberately terse, drawn-out script received praise from international critics.[9] It went on to win Best Picture at the 2014 Ophir Awards, automatically becoming Israel's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and was also nominated for a Golden Globe.[5][3] The film's production involved Arte France Cinéma, Canal+ France, and DBG.[10]

Elkabetz stated that the trilogy was made not only to represent his community but also for women in Israel who had experienced rabbinical divorce proceedings, saying the film was made for "every woman in Israel who has had to go through the process of divorce."[4] He described the hope that Gett would bring about change for women waiting years for a get as more meaningful to him than any award.[3]

Beyond the trilogy, Elkabetz directed Testimony (Edut), co-written with screenwriter Ofer Ein Gal.[11] The project involved sorting through thousands of testimonies — collected in part by B'Tselem and Breaking the Silence — over seven years.[11] The film presents accounts by Israeli soldiers serving in the territories and Palestinians, spoken by Hebrew-speaking actors, with the testimonies kept close to their original wording.[11] Elkabetz said he wanted the film to prompt discussion rather than pass quietly, and hoped for "a deeper and more complex dialogue."[11] The film's selection as a festival opener drew public criticism from Culture Minister Limor Livnat, who criticized the film without having watched it.[11]

After Ronit Elkabetz's death, Shlomi directed Black Notebooks, a two-part documentary assembled from approximately 600 hours of personal footage recorded over three decades in Morocco, the Krayot, Tel Aviv, and Paris.[6][7] He and editor and co-screenwriter Joëlle Alexis spent five years on the project, beginning roughly two years after Ronit's death.[12] The film incorporates family footage, scenes from the filmmaking process, and passages from Ronit's personal diaries, which Elkabetz reads aloud — a choice he explained by noting that Ronit had not read them aloud herself.[13][7] Alexis described the work as "a love letter from a brother to his sister."[12] Black Notebooks premiered as a special screening in the official program at Cannes and won Best Documentary at the 2021 Jerusalem International Film Festival.[6][13]

Elkabetz also produced the 70-minute documentary Je t'aime Ronit Elkabetz alongside Galit Cahlon.[14][2] Made by documentary filmmaker Moran Ifergan, the film draws on clips from Ronit's work, archival interviews, and conversations with people close to her.[14] His screen credits extend to acting: he appeared in the 2019 miniseries Our Boys and produced In Between (2016).[2] By 2015, he was head of the film department at Sapir College.[3]

The Viviane Amsalem trilogy connected shared family memories with the representation of Mizrahi women and, in Gett, the experience of a woman seeking a religious divorce.[1][8] The siblings developed the films as a joint creative project, writing side by side and moving from family-derived material toward questions of broader public significance.[3] Black Notebooks continued that dialogue after Ronit's death, reshaping decades of private footage into an unconventional two-part cinematic project.[12][7] Joëlle Alexis called it "a love letter from a brother to his sister," a description that reflects the personal dimension of work moving between family experience and public themes.[12]

Several of Elkabetz's films have generated interpretive debate. Some critics and commentators have characterized Gett in political terms: film exhibitor Greg Laemmle said the film "could be argued shows people living under a theocratic regime within Israel," though this is his personal interpretation rather than a settled description of the film.[10] The trilogy's engagement with rabbinical divorce law — a religious and legal framework under which a husband must consent to grant a get — is itself a sensitive subject, and the film's account of those proceedings comes from a dramatized narrative and a film review rather than independent legal analysis.[8]

Testimony prompted more direct public controversy: Culture Minister Limor Livnat publicly criticized the film's selection as a festival opener without having seen it.[11] The film's use of testimonies gathered by organizations including B'Tselem and Breaking the Silence placed it within contested political terrain, though Elkabetz consistently described his goal as prompting dialogue rather than proving one narrative right or wrong.[11]