| Sumario: | The past decade has marked a renaissance of women's cinema in Israel. A new generation of female filmmakers is seeking to redefine the conditions of women's representability in Israeli society and cinema. In their films, they deal with current problems in the lives of women in Israel, or with issues that have been excluded from the public agenda. They identify and address actual female communities, foregrounding marginalized or emergent social groups within local feminism. They work with and against dominant forms of representation, shifting the traditional place of the gaze, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, avant-garde and narrative, and directly addressing the film spectator as a woman. These issues—the structure of the look and the reorganization of vision—emerge especially in light of Israeli women's cinema's current preoccupation with female trauma, which in itself is embedded in matters of visibility. Focusing mainly on Michal Aviad's 2011 film Invisible , I argue that contemporary Israeli women's cinema invites us to question our viewing position of women's traumas. The new women's films do not attempt to depict female suffering realistically but rather to change the conditions of visibility of women's injury. In so doing, they challenge accepted patriarchal codes of spectatorship with respect to the woman and at her trauma. By proposing new ways of representing female pain from a female perspective, they seek to reclaim the gaze, to look differently and with fresh eyes, as an act of survival, on women's very existence in the shadow of ongoing trauma.
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