“This story represents a fundamental part of our war-stricken country”

I worked as a farmer in my kibbutz before I started film school. I am the son of a kibbutz volunteer from Switzerland and a French holocaust survivor. In 2006, before entering the Lebanese front my younger brother came to visit for 24 hours. It was clear that reserves will be called to the war too, and it meant that my two brothers and I had one last memorable night before we will all go to war.

In Yehiam, the elders turned off the sirens because it disturbed their sleep, and hence we were the only community in the north of Israel where there were no sirens. A quiet Island of «sanity» in the bombarded north. The abandoned kibbutz had become something of a drunken gypsy village, with explosions in the background, but we stayed there. Together. Celebrating our lives.

At that time it was still a unique and surreal world of the northern kibbutzim. A frozen in time «Wild West» slowly dying somewhere in the mountains of the Western Galilee. A world of alcohol, barefooted children and wild humor; hunters and hip-linked guns; all of those alongside spectacular spring blossoms, cliffs and the Mediterranean Sea. An extreme and macho society.

This specific story is burning in me because, beyond being a personal story, it represents a fundamental part of our war-stricken country. A tale of the uncounted and unaccounted statistics of war: people who are carrying concealed wounds and heavy loads of guilt and doubt, about themselves and the country reality; people who are torn between national, social pressures and the shame of an invisible «injury».