STORY.

Dalit Bloch, a Swiss-Jewish drama teacher, returns to Israel, the country of her birth, after 40 years to lead a theatre project with Arabic and Jewish teenagers. The project is based on the Swiss novel „A Village Romeo and Juliet“ by Gottfried Keller.

She encounters a land cut through with walls and trenches, deeply melancholic, sensuous, attractive and rejecting at once.

The film witnesses Dalit Bloch’s attempt to shake up the rigidity entrenched in the Jewish-Arab relations. It follows the development of the project in Jaffa, and how the teenagers tentatively approach each other, the director and Keller’s story about land, feuding families and a tragic love. The film takes us into today’s living rooms and onto the streets, elaborates, contrasts and, together with the teenagers, their parents and their social environment, collects stories and points of view. About trauma, contact, feud, impotence, separation, respect and hope.

Parallel to this the film accompanies Dalit Bloch on her journey to her past and the present. She re-lives the emotions, pictures and memories of her childhood and meets friends. Among these are Palestinian creative artists, Jewish peace activists and an old friend from Basel who became a religious settler in West Jordan. A wide span of differing lifestyles and points of view on the same land is revealed.

The film becomes a testimonial of the fragile reality of people living in a land divided by walls (real and imaginary), and of their dedicated, humorous, active or passive, but always very different struggle for their present and some common future.