Atalia is a beautiful and stubborn widow who can not conform to the kibbutz society in which she lives. She has a love affair with a boy half her age who has been rejected from military service because of physical limitations. This pits her against the narrow-minded collective. The boy is torn between his allegiance to his community and his feeling for this strange and sometimes impossible woman. Set against the backdrop of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, ATALlA dramatizes both the degeneration of highly idealistic kibbutz principles and the price that a woman can pay for emotional liberation.
