Two Israeli car dealers, Shmuel and Siso, invest five thousand American dollars into a vintage 1985 Lincoln Continental Limousine that they plan to sell in Germany for fifty grand. But when they take it there, they run into problems with the customs police, who are suspicious of Middle Easterners with a huge American gas guzzler. The routine search causes Shmuel to experience a disturbing hallucination about WWII Germany and the Nazis his parents fled from some sixty years earlier. And their adventure in Germany turns into a struggle just to make it out safely, as the echoes of the past catch up with them.
A daring hybrid of realism and fantasy, Forgiveness is a psychological thriller that explores the tragedies of the Middle East. David, a young American-Israeli, returns to Israel to join the army, only to find himself in a catatonic state after accidentally shooting a Palestinian girl while on patrol. He is committed to a mental institution which sits on the ruins of a Palestinian village. The head psychiatrist tries to cure him with medication, while another patient in the hospital, a Holocaust survivor, tries to redeem him by opening his heart to the ghost that haunts him. He returns to New York under his father’s care, believing that his horrific past is behind him until his love for a Palestinian woman brings his trauma back to the surface.
Arik, a teenage boy growing up in Haifa in 1968, gets a job working for Yankele Bride, a matchmaker. Yankele, a mysterious Holocaust survivor, has an office in back of a movie theater that shows only love stories, run by a family of Romanian little people in the seedy area by the port. Yankele introduces Arik to a new world, built on the ruins of an old one. As Arik begins to learn the mysteries of the human heart through his work with Yankele, he falls in love with Tamara, his friend Beni’s cousin. Tamara has just returned from America and is full of talk of women’s rights, free love, and rock and roll. The disparate parts of Arik’s life collide in unexpected, often funny and very moving ways as he lives through a summer that changes him forever. Avi Nesher’s mixes comedy with drama as it tells a coming-of-age story unlike any you’ve ever seen before.
Between struggling to keep up with orders in the kitchen, tending to the quirky wrongdoings of her three children, and acknowledging the multiple suicide threats made by her unstable mother, aspiring writer Aviva Cohen (Assi Levy) barely has enough time to take the cap off of her pen—much less put that pen to paper and get her stories published.
When Aviva’s successful sister Anita (Rotem Abuhav) introduces her star-struck sibling to famous author Oded Zar (Sasson Gabai), it appears as if things may be finally turning around for the hapless literary wannabe. Unfortunately for Aviva, Oded is suffering from a bad case of writer’s block. Soon after accepting Oded’s offer to serve as her personal writing tutor, Aviva begins to realize that the man whom she once idolized and who deviously assumed the guise of benevolent mentor is little more than a creatively devoid plagiarist.
A young man wakes up in the morning, opens his refrigerator, takes out a plastic bottle of orange juice, drinks from it, and then spits all the juice out. He develops a habit of stealing oranges from his neighbor’s garden. Every morning he passes by the tree and grabs a couple of oranges to eat or squeeze into juice. At the same time, his neighbor, an old man, develops his own habit: every morning he stands at his window, watches the young man stealing his oranges, and never moves an inch. But one day, the old man decides take action.
