KEREN AMIRAN::::

Amiran’s video Turtely is a portrait of an illegal Filipino worker and a tortoise that reside in an affluent suburb of Israel. The Filipino migrant has been living and working in Israel for ten years, without a residence permit, in a country with very harsh law enforcement only free to move around the house where she works.  During that time she encountered a tortoise in the garden and adopted it as a pet.  The film depicts the intriguing relationship that develops between the two protagonists.  Both the tortoise and the woman share the same living circumstances and as the film progresses we learn that they also share the same destiny.  Mirroring each other like a play, a series of projections and displacements take place, where the tortoise becomes an extension of the woman herself.  What emerges is an ambivalent situation where there is a sense of familiarity and estrangement, which is both poetic and uncanny.