Sagit Shalom

The Village Leagues

2023. Tahsin Mansour lives across the Palestinian village of Azzoun. Once its mayor, he hasn't entered the village for years, fearing for his life. When the war broke out, a roadblock was installed, turning his house into an enclave - neither Palestinian nor Israeli. Tahsin reminisces on his days as a former leader of the Village Leagues: As Palestinian nationalism unites around the PLO in the 70s, the Israeli defense ministry offers incentives to a moderate leadership which will lay the ground for a diplomatic pact. The project draws fire from the Arab world and Israeli entities, declaring the Leagues members traitors. When this project fails, they become persecuted in their own homes.

The Ancestral Sin

The story of Israel's "development towns" in a chilling documentary, as never told before: Testimonials and previously sealed transcripts reveal a method, an ideology and a cruel practice of law enforcement and decision makers behind the "population dispersal" policies in the first two decades of independence. The director's family, like others, was taken to Yeruham, a development town in the Negev desert. Their personal stories recount of the price immigrant-families pay and the price still paid by Israeli society, unwilling to deal head-on with those early years and forgotten towns.