Join us for a special film screening in honour of International Women’s Day.

An Israeli woman seeking to finalize a divorce (gett) from her estranged husband finds herself effectively put on trial by her country’s religious marriage laws in this powerhouse courtroom drama. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Viviane Amsalem has been applying for a divorce for three years but her religiously devout husband Elisha continually refuses. The film, which was Israel’s Official Foreign Language Submission for the Academy Awards in 2014, offers an uncompromising, heart-rending portrait of a woman’s struggle to achieve freedom.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Yael Machtinger, a PhD Candidate in Socio-Legal Studies at York University whose dissertation explores Jewish divorce (gett) refusal in Toronto and New York. It is the first comprehensive, qualitative study of Jewish divorce done anywhere in Canada.