‘It’s a world I know well; the characters are people I grew up with, who I know from the inside out,’ said Lee Gilat, director of the movie 'Girls Like Us', which opened in theaters throughout the country on Thursday. The powerful film tells the story of a neglected teenage girl from a rough background, whose life begins to change when she forms a bond with a female soldier. “I grew up in South Tel Aviv, and I’ve never distanced myself from that world.”
The movie won three Ophir Awards in 2024: Best Supporting Actress for Batel Moseri, who also wrote the screenplay; Best Supporting Actor for Yaakov Zada-Daniel; and Best Casting for Halley Mon Sonego. The leading actress, Hila Yosef Zada, won the Haifa Culture Foundation Award for Best Actress at the Haifa International Film Festival.
It’s the latest in a string of successes for Gilat, who recently directed and wrote the KAN series Hooligans, a gritty show about a young man who gets caught up in the violent underworld of soccer superfans.
Girls Like Us focuses on a teenage girl, Shahar (Yosef Zada), from an extremely troubled family. Her father (Zada-Daniel) is in a mental institution – although given the reality of understaffed institutions, Shahar has to take care of him a great deal – and her mother (Moseri) has extremely poor judgement and lacks boundaries, bringing home a string of men who could easily abuse Shahar and her younger sister.
Shahar attends a program for at-risk teen girls, where Peri (Hadar Dror), a female soldier just a year or so older than she is, tries to help this group make something of themselves. Given all these struggling teens in a small space, it’s a turbulent environment, but one that gives the girls their only hope of breaking the cycle of poverty, neglect, and abuse. While Shahar and Peri become close, eventually their relationship threatens to become overly intense.
'Teenage girls, if not protected, are preyed upon'
Despite the bickering and conflicts in this facility, Gilat said that places like these can be a lifeline. “There are so many families there that aren’t able to give their children what they need – even just to give them lunch or a safe place where they can be off the streets. Teenage girls, if they aren’t protected, are very much preyed upon,” she said. “And so, the place that is portrayed in the film is very positive; it protects them. It becomes a kind of alternative home for them.”
Shahar has had to take on the role of a mother at home, to protect her sister. “Her home is hopeless in a certain way… At the end, she has the same mother and father, but she has learned to look at them with some distance. She realizes that her existence is important, too, she can also worry about her own life, and what she wants and do what she needs to take care of herself.”
The dynamic between Shahar and the barely older soldier is another reflection of reality, the director said. “You take a 19-year-old girl, you put her in a uniform, and you say, she’s a teacher and that the 18-year-old girls are the pupils. It’s so important to tell the story of these girls: that there’s no responsible adult around.
“And Peri [the soldier], she can’t really be the responsible adult,” Gilat said. “She’s under a lot of pressure. She has her own demons, and she has had a homelife just as tough as Shahar’s – maybe even tougher in some ways.”
One element that helps bring the story to life is that the girls stage impromptu dance numbers whenever they can, which are vivid and lots of fun to watch, and there is lots of clowning around.
“This is very faithful to reality – I understood this from the rehearsals with the girls. Every time there was a break, they would take out a JBL [speaker] and dance. It’s the TikTok generation – that’s what they do. Their humor and the music, it’s part of youth culture today,” Gilat said.
For me, as a director of movies and television, I know that first and foremost, I’m an entertainer, and the actors have to be entertaining. There also has to be some kind of hope, humor, and something fun.”
Gilat realized that in order to get the right vibe, she would have to use a mainly non-professional cast, so she auditioned hundreds of actresses via video.
To get these non-professionals comfortable in front of the camera, she had a week of rehearsals on location, a rarity in the low-budget world of Israeli filmmaking. But it paid off and they became a close-knit group who worked together beautifully.
“The image that I used to describe what needed to happen with them was that they had to become like a pack of wolves. They developed the harmony of people who know each other very well,” she said.
Some of the actresses had similar stories to the characters and some didn’t. “But even girls from very stable households know what it’s like to go out and their neighbor says, what great legs you have, come sit on my lap. They know what it is to be a teenage girl in the public space.”
It’s a tough, moving story, but Gilat feels that audiences are ready for it. “People want to see themselves on the screen, to understand something about the world, through what you show. The minute you do that without being patronizing and without telling them you are going to teach them something, the audience is very responsive to it,” she said.
“I don’t think the audience only wants escapism. I think they want to see characters they care about and can relate to and see a film that doesn’t insult their intelligence. When you give them that, they’ll enjoy it.”