The Confessions of 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.
The Confessions are divided by musical interludes performed by The Roee Rosen Confessions Ensemble, featuring exclusively women musicians. Thus, the film is an all-women affair. The songs are three classics of different genres, dealing with dying and perversion: the aria of the death of Dido by Henry Purcell, the gospel-folk I’ll Fly Away, and Iggy Pop’s I Wanna Be Your Dog. All three songs were translated to Hebrew and arranged especially for these performances.
The Confessions cycle features three supplementary works, echoing the commodity logic of “special additions:” a trailer (Confessions Coming Soon), a music clip (I Was Called Kuny-Lemel), and a gag-reel (Gagging During Confession).

