The desire to be beautiful is still strong, no matter what the circumstances. The women giggle and pass around fragments of a broken mirror. This is a world which exists only behind Israeli prison walls, where a lullaby whispered lovingly in a baby's ear echoes with the sting of hatred, where compassion and disdain live closely together, and where empowerment grows from despair. There is no black or white in this film, only painful shades of gray.

Israeli director Natalie Assouline chronicles the lives of Palestinian women who are serving time in Israeli prison for their involvement in armed attacks in Israel. The intimate portrait, filmed over the course of two years, tries to uncover the motivations behind the resistance of these women against the brutal occupation.

Kahira, a mother of five, is serving three life terms for smuggling a suicide bomber to the heart of Jerusalem where he blew himself up, killing three people. Waffa was captured on her way to carry out a suicide attack in an Israeli hospital, where she had been treated for six months after an accident. Samar built bombs and was arrested while pregnant with her first child who is born in the course of the film.

We share the daily lives of these women, we are with them when they give birth, we listen to their pain when they talk about husbands who abandoned them, and we watch them take charge within the prison structures. We hear of religious ideology, but also of discrimination and despair in the world these women come from.

This film is structured as a journey into an unknown world between good and bad. At every turn we receive new information and experience new emotions that make it impossible to remain coherent. We find ourselves liking these women, but we feel discomfort in the fact that we do. We want to pity them, but they are too strong for our pity. We get close to them, and a moment later we are thrown clear, horrified by their actions and their lack of remorse - fascinated at the same time...