യാത്ര

Zaytoun

2012 Film

Zaytoun is the story of the unlikely alliance between a 12-year-old Palestinian refugee and an Israeli fighter pilot shot down over Beirut in 1982. Their initial distrust develops into friendship as they make their way across war-torn Lebanon on a journey to a place they both call home.

Director: Eran Riklis

Running time: 117 minutes

Zaytoun is a film about a most improbable and remarkable friendship between Fahed, a 12-year-old Palestinian refugee, and Yoni, a 30-year-old Israeli combat pilot. The film explores a luminal space between make-believe and reality, between a boy and a man, between Arab and Israeli, all set in the chaos of 1982 Beirut just weeks before the infamous invasion of the Shatila refugee camp where 700-800 Palestinians were slaughtered by the Lebanese Christian Phalangists with the tacit support of the Israeli armed forces.
Power and powerless are the essential elements that drive the narrative of this film. A powerless 12-year-old boy imagines in a fantasy of omnipotence that he shoots down an Israeli pilot who drops bombs in daily sorties from the apparent omnipotent cocoon of his jet plane. The film's audience is asked to suspend disbelief and buy into a narrative driven by the boy's wish to memorialize his recently slain father by planting a barely surviving olive tree in the family' ancestral village that is in the dreamed of Palestine, located now in Israel. To make it even more dreamlike, we come to see that the pilot who accompanies the boy on his quest may have been the very person who killed his father by dropping a bomb on him. An initial viewing of the film absorbs one in trying to sort out the chaos of the dramatic action that unfolds in the very first scene set in Beirut's Martyrs' Square, a bombed out war zone that is also a daily marketplace of bartering, of weddings, and of refugee boys imagining they are world renowned soccer stars who can dodge the bullets of the Lebanese militia that would confine them to their camp.

There is so much to track in the chaotic unfolding of the narrative that it takes a second viewing of the film -- when one knows what happens in the plot -- to realize that this movie is most essentially a study of character, of relationship, of hatred turning into friendship. In both plot and character, the film has been dismissed by some sophisticated critics as too simplistic, too idealistic, too much a wish-fulfillment. One can understand all the criticisms, but as in baseball, judging the value of this film is a game of inches. If one sees the trajectory of this film as landing in fair territory, not foul, it is a film about the potential for transcendence through friendship, about the mutual initiation of two characters into their respective humanity, and about beauty in the midst of a nightmare.