An angry, powerful indictment of ultra-Orthodox extremism in Jerusalem, Amos Gitaï's Kadosh (meaning "sacred") takes place in a tiny quarter called Mea Shearim, where a woman is valued more for her womb than her soul. Gitaï hinges what might have been a grossly didactic melodrama on the warmly expressive faces of Yaël Abecassis and Meital Barda, who fully inhabit and humanize their roles as two sisters suffering under dogmatic oppression. Abecassis, a loving wife to devoutly religious husband Yoram Hattab, has failed to produce a child in 10 years of marriage, which makes her an outcast in the community. Her infertility—or, it's later suggested, his sterility—leads their strict rabbi to force Hattab to bed another woman against his will. The younger and more impetuous Barda secretly loves a sensitive folk musician (Sami Hori) who deserted the Orthodox sect, but her mother has arranged her marriage to brutal zealot Uri Ran-Klausner. Their wedding night, a coldly ritualized affair punctuated by a brief torrent of sexual violence, is the film's most harrowing scene, pitilessly captured in real time. Gitaï's agenda is obvious from the start, yet his impressively austere visual style allows his points to seep through without making them seem too imposing or heavy-handed. A former director of ethnographic documentaries, Gitaï favors long takes and a steady camera, which give the actors enough space to develop their scenes into something more organic than those in conventional fiction films. The two leads respond with carefully measured and deeply sympathetic performances that rely on minute gestures to draw out emotions their characters could never overtly express. Kadosh shows surprisingly little respect for Orthodox traditions, which Gitaï condemns as contradictory and behind the times, a cruel means toward the oppression of women. Before it stumbles in a disappointing climactic twist, Kadosh makes a convincing argument on behalf of those women.