SHOWTIMES: 4:45p | 9:15p - SUN 2/21
PART OF THE ATHENS JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2010
WINNER: 2008 Israeli Film Academy: Best Actress: Hiam Abbass
WINNER: 2008 Berlin International Film Festival: Panorama Audience Award: Eran Riklis
Salma Zidane (Hiam Abbass), the proud, handsome 45-year-old Palestinian woman at the center of LEMON TREE, an allegory of Israeli-Palestinian strife, has the misfortune of living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Widowed for 10 years, with a son in the United States, Salma earns a meager living from a lemon grove on the Green Line separating Israel from the occupied territories of the West Bank. The grove has been in her family for 50 years.
Her solitary life suddenly turns upside down when the Israeli defense minister, Israel Navon (Doron Tavory), moves into a fancy new house that abuts the grove. Overnight a watchtower is constructed, and security guards and soldiers begin patrolling the property. No sooner have Navon and his beautiful, cultured wife, Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), moved into the new house than Salma receives an official letter informing her that the grove poses a security threat from terrorists hiding among the trees; as a military necessity they must be uprooted....
Thus begins an escalating war of words and of wills. After Salma argues her case before a military tribunal and is rebuffed, she takes her campaign to the Israeli Supreme Court.
LEMON TREE, directed by the Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis, whose 2004 movie, THE SYRIAN BRIDE, explored Israeli-Arab border tensions, is also a wrenching, richly layered feminist allegory as well as a geopolitical one. As such, its details are not to be taken too literally. The screenplay by Mr. Riklis and Suha Arraf, the Palestinian-Israeli woman who wrote THE SYRIAN BRIDE with Mr. Riklis, finds a deep commonality between Salma and Mira. Victimized by patriarchal attitudes toward war and sex, both begin to break the rules.
nytimes.com
