The tape arrives with a note: "PLEASE DO NOT WATCH FILM BETWEEN FRIDAY EVE TO SATURDAY EVE - SHABBAT!!!!!!!!!" The film, you understand, is Israeli and it was shot in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighbourhoods of Beit Israel and Mea Shearim. The director, Gidi Dar, says this is a "real historical precedent". No one, he says, has ever been allowed to make a film - or even tried to - about the haredi (literally, "one who trembles") that is at all sympathetic to their lifestyle. And to ensure their cooperation, Dar promised to adhere to certain religious principles - including respecting ultra-Orthodox beliefs on the sanctity of the Jewish sabbath.

Dar's film Ushpizin (Aramaic for "guests") couldn't have happened without the involvement of Shuli Rand, a former star of Israeli stage and screen who, almost a decade ago, became a hozer b'tshuvah, one of the "newly religious", and disappeared into the closed world of Hasidism.

Dar, by his own admission a thoroughly modern, liberal, secular Israeli, remained friends with Rand despite the latter's conversion. Together they came up with the story of Ushpizin, about a hozer b'tshuvah whose secular past returns to haunt him. Ultra-Orthodox codes (a woman cannot be alone with a man other than her husband, nor can a man touch any woman other than his wife) meant that Rand's wife, Michal Bat-Sheva Rand, had to play his screen wife.

Cinema and the ultra-Orthodox have a prickly relationship. It's technically forbidden by the most fundamental decree of the Jewish religion: the first commandment. According to Dar, a rabbi called Shalom Arush - "a very brave man" - stuck his neck out to secure filming: "Now the film is out, he could be in big trouble, but I hope not." Then came the rabbi's reward: after the film's well-received premiere at the Jerusalem film festival last week, he took to the stage and delivered a sermon on the teachings of Rabbi Nahman of Breslau, to whose sect he belongs. In true Israeli style, half the audience - the secular half - walked out.