Keren Kraizer left Israel at 20 to study dance in Belgium, but also to escape her home country and its divisions. A visit to her family at the start of 2023 prompts an unexpected desire to reconnect with where she comes from, a process of considerable ambivalence which she decides to document in a video diary. Plucked from everyday life with a beautifully intuitive grasp for structure and montage, the resulting words and images move back and forth between the personal and the political with an inevitability born of the current state of the nation: a conversation with her mother about the lack of vision for lasting peace; footage of a man being shouted at for waving a Palestinian flag during the protests against Netanyahu’s assaults on the rule of law; the heartbreaking poem in English texted to her by a friend she made on an activist trip to the West Bank who didn’t want to be filmed; the nocturnal chat with her new boyfriend while wandering the streets of Jerusalem about all the tensions boiling under the ground, a chat that turns out to be grimly prophetic. For Kraizer’s diary will soon be overtaken by events beyond her control, and ambivalence will give way to anguish and disbelief. What now? How to contain people’s pain? “We are the ones who walk barefoot on the shreds of hope. We didn’t create war, but we created poems from its ruins.”

James Lattimer