The movie a Hebrew-language drama that opened around Israel on Thursday, begins as a new group of young people arrive at the kibbutz to be there as part of their army service. Their idealism is balanced by their desire to have fun, and a lot of romances begin and fizzle, as they fit shifts working in the fields in between trips to the beach – in Gaza. That’s right.
In Gaza. That’s because the movie, the debut feature film of Keren Nechmad, which was made more than a year before the outbreak of the current war, is set in 1977, a time when Israel still occupied the Gaza Strip. The movie dramatizes this period of uneasy coexistence; that while the young volunteers want everything to be easy and joyful, the threat of terrorism is ever-present.
Arik Einstein sang about it in “Drive slowly,” with the line, “And I think, we’re getting close to Gaza, and they better not throw a grenade,” just a few years before the movie is set. The tension creates a backdrop to the story of a summer that changes everyone in the group. Kissufim, which Nechmad wrote with Hadar Arazi and Yonatan Bar Ilan, gracefully weaves the coming-of-age tropes with the reality of life in Israel during a time of hope – then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem during the period when the film takes place, and the characters watch this momentous news event unfold on television.
But it’s important for Nechmad to talk not only about the historical background of the movie, but also the eve.