"We don’t like improvisation. We like to be free in our text, and for that the actor must be very prepared. Freedom comes after the work. I expect from my actors what I go through myself. Only like that can we do what we want, in the theater for example, it’s only after a few months of playing the same part, that we can start doing things we didn’t think about before, because we forgot the text and the work, and we can live in the moment."
Multi-award-winning Israeli actor-director Ronit Elkabetz was the daughter of Moroccan immigrants. Her most successful film was also her most recent: Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, in which she starred as an orthodox Jewish woman attempting to obtain a religious divorce; she also co-directed and wrote it with her brother Shlomi. The film won numerous awards, and was nominated for the best foreign language film Golden Globe in 2015.
Elkabetz’s breakthrough role, internationally, was The Band’s Visit, the 2007 culture-clash comedy about an Egyptian police band who are stuck in a restaurant overnight while attempting to reach an Arab cultural centre in Israel. Directed by Eran Kolirin, Elkabetz played the restaurant owner, and the film screened at the Cannes film festival before a successful release in Europe and the US.
In 1994 she won an Ophir (Israeli film academy award) for best supporting actress for Sh’chur, a drama set in Israel’s Moroccan-émigré community, and in 2001 won the Ophir for best actress for Late Marriage, a comedy set in Israel’s Georgian-émigré community.
Elkabetz, meanwhile, had largely relocated to Paris, spending time as a student at Ariane Mnouchkine’s celebrated Théâtre du Soleil, and began working in French-language cinema with the 2001 comedy Origine Contrôlée.
