‘The Confessions of Roee Rosen, I Was Called Kuny-Lemel & Gagging During Confession - Roee Rosen’

At the beginning of Confessions Roee Rosen declares that now that he is about to die, he disavows a career replete with lies, scandals, and fake identities. and joins the confessional tradition that leads from St. Augustine to American TV. These confessions, however, are delivered by female surrogates - Roee Rosen 1, 2 and 3 - three illegal foreign workers residing in Israel. They deliver the monologues in Hebrew, a language they do not speak, by reading a transliteration of the text to Latin letters from a teleprompter. Marks on the teleprompter scroll indicated to the performers to occasionally mimic the body movements and facial expressions of the real Roee Rosen, at the other side of the camera. The text is built as a hybrid: on the one hand, it offers a rather dubious account of my own “crimes,” but on the other hand, it is partially plausible as a monologue of a foreign worker.
Kuni Lemel is the legendary "schlemiel" hero of Jewish shtetl fables. In the video, a sedentary band is seen while we can hear overlayed Yiddish music.
Gagging During Confession is a compilation of "bloopers" from the filming of The Confessions of Roee Rosen. The film features three female foreign workers reciting a text written in Hebrew, which they do not understand, and mimicking the body gestures of another person standing outside the camera's frame (Rosen). The women speak in first person, as if they were indeed the artist Roee Rosen, author of the text. There are no cinematic pretensions on the women's part. They get paid for their work. The Hebrew transcript and the appearance of the readers-confessors, who clearly do not understand what they are uttering, produces situations evocative of pop culture bloopers, yet which still hold a dark and different shades.