ZAYTOUN
Director: Eran Riklis
Feature film | GB/IL/F | 2012
110 min | Dolby SRD
48th Hof International Film Festival
2014
During the 1982 Lebanon War, the Israeli fighter pilot Yoni is shot down over Beirut and captured by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Fahed, a young Palestinian refugee upset by the death of his father in an Israeli air attack, agrees to help Yoni escape and lead him out of the city if Yoni will get him over the border and back to his family’s ancestral village. He would like to fulfil his father’s last wish and bring the last remaining olive tree of the family’s back to their Palestinian village.
As they embark on a hazardous road trip across the war-ravaged country, Yoni and Fahed move from suspicion and mutual antagonism to a tentative camaraderie as they make their way closer to the place they both call home.