May 2000. Southern Lebanon. For 18 years now, Israel’s most controversial war drags on and on adding fragmented slivers of shattered lives to ashes of smoldering hopes. Up there on the hill overlooking the feathery fairy-tale clouds, a hallucinatory body of boy-soldiers inhabited a world of petrified anguish, coated with layers of innocence. Dispossessed and exiled, they carried out unfathomable orders, fighting invisible yet fatal phantoms; their gazes, clouded with embittered, wizened dread – the chilly stare of the sharpshooter masquerades the bewildered gape of the child who chases his evading innocence. Wasted, they hang between the backdrop of earthly paradise and the engulfing abyss of raging inferno.
