Full Description
Popular journalist Shlomi Eldar made his career as a war correspondent for Israeli television. His beat was Gaza, the crowded strip of land on the Mediterranean coast where 1.2 million people live. After Hamas came to power, Gaza was closed to him. He looks instead to hospitals—one of the few remaining bridges between Israelis and Palestinians—for stories. He follows a lead to a desperate Palestinian family at Israel’s Tel Hashomer Hospital trying to save their immune-deficient baby boy, Mohammad. Eldar goes public with the story and within hours an Israeli comes forward with an anonymous gift of $50,000 for a life-saving bone marrow transplant. Eldar’s camera pulls us deeply into a politically fraught story, hoping that his reportage will make a difference. Suddenly, he captures a moment of unflinching candor when the baby’s mother blurts out that she hopes her son will become a martyr to recover Jerusalem. As the mother struggles to address both her desperate desire to protect her son and harsh criticism from her Gaza community, Eldar tries to bridge the gulf with a humanism laced with hope, in this internationally acclaimed film feted last fall in a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman.
