We don’t see where they are at first, we just hear one of the two men speaking in voice-over, in Hebrew, the Israeli who can’t sleep while his Palestinian boyfriend tosses and turns beside him in bed, plagued by nightmares, everything is more heightened by night. As the speaker makes clear, they’re at home in Paris, their dog nestled between them. But his account only touches on that in passing, it’s more about trying to make sense of the political situation back home: a war, an ongoing catastrophe so terrible it’s impossible to truly describe. Maybe any such attempt is futile, but what else can one do?
The speaker’s turn of phrase is formidable, his words spiral and turn around on themselves, talking of horrors, protests, discrimination, but also of family, intimacy, the memory of joy. The images fold back on themselves as well, shuttling through the dark apartment but also leaving it for the world outside, metro stations, indeterminate landscapes, streets in snow. They also work with the contrast between light and dark, although darkness mostly dominates, too. Yet there is still talk of waking up in the morning, of new dawns, however intangible or impossible to reach, and the images of the bed by daylight and the man waking up in it carry infinite tenderness. What else is left to hold on to than that?