Bartana’s work betrays a fascination with ceremonies and social rituals, and with the role of the latter in the shaping of communities and individuals. Yet these works are at a far remove from any direct documentary mode; modelled on the aesthetics of ritual, they are above all performative creations the audience is won over by without realising it. Her films point up the fact that cinema is itself a ritual and that the camera, perhaps better than anything else, imitates ritual in its capacity to fetishise, to seduce and to draw us into the ceremony we are witnessing.