This documentary by oscar nominee Hava Beller shows Israel's problem in trying to heal relations within its population and with Palestinians in a nutshell. The scene comes straight after the opening credits: A young Gazan boy is arrested for throwing rocks at police. His mother wants to explain the situation and save her son, but the police can't realize this because they literally don't speak her language. The police are all young, the oldest looking to be in his mid 30s, but most no older than 20. They also act indignant in the way you expect 20 year olds to be when given too much power. Wisely the film leaves this act of cultural isolation as nearly the sole act of hatred between Israeli and Palestinian to be directly depicted.
Instead we get an uncomfortable and complicated look at some of these young people trying to cross cultural and linguistic differences at a retreat in Germany. These aren't articulate geniuses of the dilemma rather ordinary people living in the land. Occasionally it cuts to footage showing life in the land. This is typically through IDF body cams and interviewees home videos. None of this is terribly surprising for those who know Israel, but I can imagine the sight of a soldier talking to a settler in a way that highlights the divisions among the country's Jews would be surprising to those who only casually pay attention to matters. Ordinary people in explaining their lives also breed context for the emotions of the retreat. This makes the film a bit scattershot, even worse than how I am writing now, with story threads and timelines being bumped around constantly to the point of being inarticulate. I'm okay with that though both because it follows the free flowing nature of the Germany discussion and really gives a full sense of how complicated the situation is.
To get a tad political the film is about walls, literal and metaphorical, and what to do with them as they don't seem capable of breaking and must be worked around. That's an accidental coincidence since this was being shot, it seems, for about a decade. Still it stings of the moment in a way that connects this plight over a space the size of New Jersey to the rest of the world in a wise way. In a certain way the film tries to shrink down to one single aspect of this wall, a solitary brick, in order to crack it. Despite tackling a number of rhetorical arguments about the situation it all seems to come down to that scene I described above. Two people trying to save their own and unable to accomplish it though all it would take is understanding the words of the other one because the other is indeed an other. It's not revealed until late into the film after we've seen the true hell a small family has to deal with that we get, in the cutest form possible, an answer to that miscommunication. I won't spoil it for all zero of you who will check out this film, but the film has a main character a Gazan woman and her son who cross the border. The why, its difficulties for them, and the presentation of an Israeli doctor give the film something to hope for as it is a real thing.