Looking for Yadida

Description

Official Selections/Screenings
Diamond Award for Best Director of a Documentary Film
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

Trailer

Synopsis

With the establishment of the State of Israel, hundreds of Mizrahi and Balkan infants disappeared from immigrant camps. More than half were of Yemeni origin. Over the years, following public outcry, three commissions of inquiry were established, yet the fate of most of the children, including Yadida Jovany, remains unknown. The story of Aunt Yadida is a story of claustrophobia, of a dark, dusty storeroom that remained locked for years. Her living-dead presence hovered in the air of the family home.

The opening of the archives in 2016 and the release of over 100,000 documents offered a first opportunity for an intimate acquaintance with her past. What color were the crib bars she lay in at the infant home? Did she hear the soft sounds of a lullaby from a kind nurse’s lips, or did fluorescent silence fill her room?

This archival film opens a window through three circles: the public, the institutional, and the familial. It moves from denial to recognition, from silence to speech, from chaos to paternalism. The contrast between the terse documents and the harrowing testimonies, suppressed for years, casts new light on the failures of the health and welfare systems. Will revisiting this affair enable healing, or only deepen the wound?

Director

Israela Shaer Meoded is an Israeli film director, screenwriter, and film scholar whose work explores personal and collective memory, gender, and marginalized voices in Israeli society. In addition to her filmmaking career, she teaches cinema at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School, where she lectures in the Department of Screen-Based Arts. Her academic research focuses on the history of women filmmakers in Israel and on Mizrahi feminist-political cinema of the 1970s.

Her selected filmography includes the feature and mid-length works Looking for Yadida (2025), which she wrote and directed; Woman (2019); and Mori: Shabazi’s Riddle (2018). She has also directed several short films, including Shimon (2019) and Queen Khantarisha (2009).