ScreenWize

Where would you start to explore the complexities of relations between Palestinian and Israeli people living around the occupied West Bank? Any story would surely run the risk – like the politics of the area – of getting bogged down in the trenches of history. Israeli Director Eras Riklas decided not to take sides with this beautifully straightforward tale about human dignity, but rather show how war-ready structures of state and culture render everything powerless.

Salma Zidane (Hiam Abbass) is a beautiful widow, living humbly amongst a grove of lemon trees that lie on the Green Line that runs between Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. The trees have been in the family for 50 years, planted by her father. She now lives alone, squeezing out a living of sorts from her lemons, and relying on cash sent from her son who’s working in New York. When Israeli Defense Minister Israel Navron moves into the house directly across the border from Salma, secret service agents decide that the grove is a security threat and must be cut down. Salma decides to fight the move, and engages lawyer Ziad Daud (Ali Sulman) to help her through the court system. Complicating matters for Minister Navron is his wife Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), who is as lonely on her side of the fence as Salma is on the other. She too has a child in America and shares the big house only with security guards and anxious agents. Complicating matters for Salma is the pressure she comes under to guard her honour and uphold the memory of her dead husband.

What’s extraordinary about the story is that there’s no real hostility evident between any of these people. Riklas and his superb cast make all the characters involved human and dignified, and at various points each reaches out to help another, but all are trapped by the heavy burden of political reality. Abbass – who you may have recently seen in The Visitor – is mesmerising as the courageous and composed woman who has to navigate the patriarchal pressures of an ambiguous legal system and a culture that discriminates severely against widows. Her performance is as carefully poised as that of Lipaz-Michael playing the lonely minister’s wife, and it’s these two women - on either side of the fence - who carry the emotional burden of the story.

The film deservedly took out the audience award at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, and seems to be part of a recent renaissance of Isreali cinema.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon