Made on an infinitesimal budget but with compassion, empathy and consideration, this documentary is the product of an encounter between two journalists. Mike Joseph is a Welsh Jew whose mother just barely escaped the Holocaust (the rest of her immediate family weren’t so lucky); Sami Abu Salem is Palestinian reporter living in Gaza, who has lost members of his family and close friends in the violence inflicted on Palestinians since the founding of Israel. His mother remembers the slaughter that killed dozens of people in her village, Bureir or Burayr, in 1948, a decimation wrought as Israelis established the kibbutz Bror Hayil nearby.
Years later on that kibbutz’s farms, Abu Salem worked as a young man, excited to be visiting the location of his family’s home town, even if it had all been wiped out. He even tried to find the eucalyptus tree his mother told him she once planted as a child. Now in middle age, Abu Salem tells Joseph about his family’s history on a Zoom call, the camera filming Abu Salem on the screen and cutting away to Joseph sitting at his desk. In voiceover, Joseph apologises for the seeming one-sidedness of the setup, which seems to favour Joseph as the interviewer-protagonist, but it couldn’t be helped. The complementary footage shot in Gaza at the same time by Abu Salem was destroyed when bombing commenced in the wake of Hamas’s brutal 7 October attack.
