Drama. Israel.
90 min.
Director: Salomon Chakol
Script: Moish Goldberg, Salomon Chakol, Assia Aldema
Production: Ronen Machlis-Balzam
Production Company: Metaphor Ltd.
The film takes place over the course of about a month in Kiryat Moshe, a neighborhood inhabited by Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. A few years ago, the neighborhood was taken over by a criminal organization and has since been managed group of “White” Israelis. The group recruits the Ethiopian youth, and turns them into its “troops,” who commit the crimes on its behalf. Many of them end up in prison; some of them even get killed, while the big money ends up in the hands of the organization’s White leadership. The story begins when one of these “soldiers” named Adana decides to change his life after the death of his mother, and to betray the organization that recruited him, when he was just a boy. This sets off a series of dramatic events, many of them violent, which will completely change the lives of the protagonists, young Ethiopians looking for respect and a sense of belonging in a neighborhood that everyone dreams of leaving. This is a hyper-realistic crime drama, both nerve-wracking and heart-breaking. It is based on a true story of immigrants, who were forgotten and abandoned by the state. The difficulties they face are only exacerbated by a criminal organization, which turns the racism they already face into an established norm in the most shocking way imaginable.