Full Description
What would you do if you believed your greatest enemy was living in the apartment above you? That’s the situation 14-year-old Ari Messalem finds himself in when his parents move their family away from the fighting in Lebanon to the heart of Berlin. Alexander, a Russian Jew and World War II veteran, lives alone in the cluttered apartment above Ari, surrounded by memories from his past. As Ari struggles to fit in, he falls in with a group of young Arab troublemakers with no sympathy for anyone Jewish. In an attempt to impress his new friends, Ari gets caught up in an act of racial hatred that lands him in a serious predicament. What happens next is a surprise to everyone, but no one more than Alexander and Ari. In Kaddish for a Friend, writer-director Leo Kashin’s debut feature, we meet two very different men from opposite sides of a conflict who discover that not only do they have something to learn from each other, but that friendship can be found in the most unlikely of places.
