page_title: Michal Bat-Adam
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Michal Bat-Adam / Career
caption_attribution_description: עברית: מיכל בת אדם בסרט עתליה 1984
context_page_description: Michal Bat-Adam is an Israeli film director, producer, screenwriter, actress, and musician. Her films deal with complex and conflicted relationships, especially relationships within families. She also explores the line between sanity and mental illness. Many of these movies contain autobiographical elements.
  As an actress, she has been noted for her work, especially for strong performances in the films of her husband, Moshé Mizrahi.
context_section_description: In 1972 Bat-Adam was cast in the title role in Moshe Mizrahi's film I Love You Rosa. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and entered into the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. The role launched Bat-Adam's career as a film actress.
  After a short-lived first marriage, Bat-Adam and Mizrahi married.  She continued to act in several of Mizrahi's movies, including; The House on Chelouche Street (1973), Daughters, Daughters (1973), and Women (1996). She appeared in Mizrahi's Academy Award-winning French film, Madame Rosa in 1977.
  Bat-Adam was living in Paris in the late 1970s when she began her career as a screenwriter and director. Her first film was a French-Israeli co-production, Moments (1979), released in the United States under the title Each Other. According to film scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Moments explores a lesbian relationship between two actresses in an "oblique, experimental manner", using cinematic devices such as memory flashbacks to construct and deconstruct their relationship. In addition to writing and directing, Bat-Adam cast herself in the film, which explores an intense, tempestuous friendship between two women. The film received favorable reviews, as well as a great deal of publicity, due to its frank depiction of the complicated relationship, including a scene in which she is in bed with actor Assi Dayan and the French actress Brigitte Catillon.
  Following Moments, Bat-Adam worked on two films that have autobiographical themes, The Thin Line (1980), which recalls a mother struggling with mental illness, and Boy Meets Girl in 1982.  This film, shot on Kibbutz Ma'ayan Tzvi, draws from Bat-Adam's memories of a young girl left by her parents at a kibbutz.
  In the late 1980s, Bat-Adam directed two literary adaptations, The Lover (1986) and A Thousand and One Wives (1989). For television she worked on a drama, The Flight of Uncle Peretz (1993).  She returned to autobiographical elements for later films, Aya: Imagined Autobiography (1994) and Maya (2010).
  Although still active as a film-maker and actress, Bat-Adam now teaches at Tel Aviv University and Camera Obscura. She also performs poetry recitals and has recorded a CD of her reading, set to music.
caption: Bat-Adam, 1984
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