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Nir Bergman’s Pink Lady, which screened at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, examines lives influenced by faith and tradition. In Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, the film shows Bati (Nur Fibak), a young wife and mother. Her orderly life shifts when someone extorts her husband, Lazer (Uri Blufarb), using romantic photos with a male study partner. Though this situation points to Lazer’s inner conflict between sexuality and faith, the film centers on Bati’s personal growth.

Bati lives by ritual and implicit rules. She works at the mikveh—a ritual bath for purification—which shows two sides of her world: a space for renewal that also restricts. During her efforts to keep her marriage intact, Bati starts to question what others expect from her, including her duties as a wife and her community’s silence about physical love.

Suppression and custom run through the story. Lazer endures conversion therapy,...

The subject of married gay men struggling with their sexuality in ultra-religious settings is not a new one to cinema. Among others, Jayro Bustamente’s Tremors explored the fallout in an evangelical setting and Haim Tabakman showed it playing out against an ultra-Orthodox Jewish backdrop in Eyes Wide Open.

Screenwriter Mindi Ehrlich, who drew on her own experiences within the Hasidic Jewish community for the film, brings a freshness to the subject by focusing on the female perspective of events - meaning it is a close cousin to the Morrocan-set and similarly themed Blue Caftan. It means that this is not just a film tackling the difficulties faced by a gay man to live his own truth in an environment that strictly controls everything, including sex, but also a story of female self-discovery and emancipation.

Bati (Nur Fibak) and Lazer (Uri Blufarb) appear to have a strong marriage. Their conversations are.

“This film is important, but the most important [thing] for us right now is to bring the hostages back home and for the Israel-Middle East conflict to stop as fast as possible,” says Nir Bergman, one of Israel’s most esteemed filmmakers, in a conversation with Variety about his Tallinn competition entry “Pink Lady.”

Bergman, whose credits include the multi-awarded pics “Broken Wings,” Cannes selected “Here We Are” as well as the original Israeli series “BeTipul,” later turned into HBO’s “In Treatment,” has peaceful messages of tolerance and acceptance in many of his works.

His latest drama, “Pink Lady,” running in the official selection of Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival, tackles the topic of hidden sexual desires and homosexuality in an ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem.

The story turns on Bati, a young woman seemingly happy with her husband, Lazer, and their three children. However, cracks in their relationship start...