Hanele

`Hanele' is a timeless tale of generational and ideological conflict set in an enclave of religious Jews in Sub-Carpathian Ukraine in the 1930's. Without a dowry, and refusing to marry the slow-witted village boy who wants her hand, beautiful Hanele escapes provincial Polana by joining a Zionist youth group recruiting young men and women for work in the big city. There she meets and falls in love with Ivo Karadzic, a handsome, successful freethinking secular Jew who has renounced all traditional religious belief. When Hanele brings Ivo home to ask for her father's permission to marry, the resulting collision of the modern and the traditional worlds causes shocks and reverberations that threaten to both ruin her family and end the engagement to Ivo. Award-winning director Kachyna, already in his seventies when making this film, has created a stirring period melodrama about love, belief, family and the difficulty of making choices.