[1] They were "home-grown farces and melodramas that provided escapist entertainment during a tense period in Israeli history".
Although Bourekas films were some of the most successful in the box office, they typically received terrible reviews from critics.
[5]: 212 The protagonist is usually a Mizrahi Jewish man, almost always poor, canny and with street smarts, who comes into conflict with the institutions of the state or figures of Ashkenazi origin—mostly portrayed as rich, conceited, stuck-up, cold-hearted and alienated.
In many of these films, actors imitate different Hebrew accents, especially that of Jews originating from Morocco, Persia, and Poland.
"[a][5]: 213 In a book entitled "Israeli Bourekas Films: their Origins and Legacy"(2023),[8] the scholar Rami Kimchi claims that the portrayal of Israeli Mizrahi communities in these films bears a strong resemblance to the portrayal of the 19th century East European shtetl by classic Yiddish writers Kimchi attributes the commercial success of these films to their "hybridity", i.e. they were Israeli/Mizrahi and Diasporic/Ashkenazi at one and the same time, thereby satisfying the political, sociological, and psychological needs of both Mizrahi and Ashkenazi audiences in Israel.