After more than a decade of travelling through Asia, making documentaries and meditating, filmmaker Ayelat Menahemi landed on home soil to direct the heart-warming Israeli drama Noodle.

Back in the early nineties, Israeli filmmaker Ayelat Menahemi was a young writer/director with two feature films behind her and a bright career ahead of her. She decided to travel through Asia to broaden her horizons, and came into contact with a Buddhist meditation technique called Vipassana, which she started practicing. "I had a change in my views, and I wanted to be more connected to reality," Menahemi admits today. She returned to documentary filmmaking, which she'd initially practiced in Israel, but her approach was not simply about recording reality. "I didn't care much about showing things as they are," Menahemi says. "I was more interested in the emotional impact."

Now 45, it is two years since Menahemi completed her return to fiction with Noodle, an award winning drama about Miri (Mili Avital), a twice-widowed flight attendant living in Tel Aviv, whose Chinese cleaning lady suddenly takes off, leaving behind her young son. Miri doesn't speak Chinese, and Noodle (as the boy becomes affectionately known) doesn't speak Hebrew; Miri is still in mourning, and Noodle is helplessly crying out for his mum; Miri's sister is going through a separation from a man who is infatuated with Miri, and a former flame appears to muddy the waters, but at least he speaks Chinese. This group of likeable survivors must then find a way to get Noodle back to his mum. "The time was right," says Menahemi when asked why she returned to fiction. "It was sitting there and waiting. All through my thirties, I was doing a lot of meditation, and the mind gets creative. That's how Noodle came up; during a meditation course, the whole story came to me"

The various pieces, however, came from reality. "There was a chat show that had me on talking about meditation," Menahemi explains. "Afterwards, I got this call from a woman who was interested. She was a senior flight attendant, and she had an amazing life story. She lost two husbands in two Israeli wars, and her strength, vitality and force of life was so inspiring. Miri is a much more introverted character than this woman, but it's just that Miri is earlier in the process of getting over the grief, and finding a new way to love and live."

The other aspect of the story - the illegal immigrant theme - was ripped straight from the headlines. "Around 2000, the Israeli government formed the immigration police, which was, at first, dedicated to deporting as many illegal foreign workers as possible," Menahemi explains. "Later, it became more humane, but in the beginning there was all this news about people jumping out of windows and things like that. I came into contact with a woman, who was in charge of human rights for illegal foreign workers, and I presented the scenario to her. She just went over it with me, and told me how something like that could happen. It does sound far fetched, but it could happen. Reality is the best screenwriter, and it's always stranger than whatever our mind can come up with."

You can't help but think that idea-starved Hollywood would grab such a heartwarming tale and transplant it to New York with Catherine Zeta-Jones in the lead role. When FILMINK suggests this to Menahemi, she tells us that a remake is already in the works. "It's being made in France," she says. "It's a good story. Noodle is probably not going to be Chinese in the French remake, but I'm curious to know what nationality they're going to use."

Since she's not involved in the remake, what's Menahemi's next move? "I'm working on a new feature film, and it's going to be shot in China," she replies. "It's going to be totally different from Noodle. I don't know if a genre like it exists, but I would call it a poetic thriller with supernatural elements. When I was travelling, I started in China, and it's remained in my mind. I always want to go back there to visit, and to shoot of course. That's what I like to do."

Noodle is released on June 18.