In the opening image, there is a grid between the camera and the world, conveying the field of vision of an Israeli soldier deployed as a cameraman in the Israeli-occupied territories between 2007 and 2010. The filmmaker’s self-critical comments today ask what he could and could not see then. Leaving the country and arriving in Germany triggered a learning process that he traces here in a multi-layered and very personal research: “I learned I can’t trust myself to do the right thing.”
Complex camera pans show current German street scenes that bundle up signs of a precarious coexistence, while family and friends drift apart over the so-called Middle East Conflict. Ron Rothschild now lives in a country that his grandmother had to flee at the age of seven to escape from the Nazis. Even in old age, she could still recite Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” from memory. Once arrived in Haifa, she became a soldier and part of the establishment of the state of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians. The yearning to belong creates ambivalences and open questions in the family’s history, which the grandson confronts without resolving the ever-new distances emerging between the camera eye and the world.