1973. Six years after returning from the Six Day War with a battle shock, Menashe realizes he will never be the man he used to be before the war. He can’t communicate with his surroundings, and spends his days driving away in his red track for long hours. The young family he created collapses due to his lack of communication with his wife, Dafna, and their little son, Shlomi.
At a time when PTSD is still not recognized as a medical condition, Dafna, his wife, struggles to get help from the military in order to maintain her husband’s last bits of sanity, while 10 year-old Shlomi tries to understand what happened to his father and why he is different.
When the Yom Kipur War breaks out, and Menashe is sent again to the battle field, the small family crumbles to the dust.
- Stanislaw jerzy lec
but not to memories"
"you can close your eyes to reality
SYNOPSIS
In the 70s, people who returned from the war with the phenomenon of "shell shock" were not yet diagnosed as people suffering from PTSD. People were forced to hide what they were going through, whether it was shame or whether it a lack of knowledge and understanding about what the real problem was. Some of them went to sleep at night with the hope that they would wake up "normal" the next morning.
This situation caused those fighters to draw inward and hide the disease and this concealment led to them being considered as a crazy person. So without reason or explanation they are perceived by society as eccentric people who don't adhere to the norm. In our opinion, despite fifty years having passed since then and the awareness, care and attention having improved in these years, the government still makes the shell-shocked feel like outcasts, because the fact is that there are still a lot of soldiers with PTSD in the closet who refuse to come out and admit what they are going through. And the state, rather than to go and look for them and take real responsibility, is satisfied to sit around and wait for them to come to it.The film is not an autobiographical film, but it is a very personal film that touches the scars of our childhood experiences. Our goal was to create a film depicting the disintegration of the family unit; however, it was important to clarify that sometimes there is no blame in these situations, and hence the choice of a shell shocked soldier who by virtue of being "sick" tears the family apart. From there also came our choice to present the film as a triangle that includes a father, mother and a child, so we as artists would have a number of angles from which to release our charges.
In addition, the choice of a soldier shell shocked from the Six Day War was made to express that in war there is no real victor. Even in the war which ended in "victory" after six days, we lost a lot of people who did not return from battle or returned half dead. For these people and their families it was not a victory but the beginning of an era of grief and deep pain. And if you look at the war in the mirror of history then the "victory" of the Six-Day War created a political and geographical reality for which the Israeli society pays with its blood until today.