Souvenirs

Shahar is an unemployed filmmaker. His father Sleiman, a strict 82-year-old Yemenite, suggests that Shahar make a film about the Jewish Brigade in which he had served during WWII.Shahar becomes enthusiastic only when he realizes that his father may have left behind some ‘souvenirs,’ by having impregnated two Dutch women. He decides to make the film, hoping to find his father’s lost offspring, and maybe take off some of the burden of his father’s criticism. Retracing history by car, father and son set out together on the trail of the Jewish Brigade, beginning in Israel, through Italy and Germany, and ending in Holland with a surprising discovery.The film exposes the complex father-son relationship between Sleiman and Shahar with humor and compassion, and raises universal questions about the tension between myths of bravery and reality, and between memory and historical truth.