Two interconnected stories in the 1930s, one set in Berlin, the other in Palestine: Mania Vilbouchevich Shohat (1880-1961), called Tania, a Russian Jew and revolutionary, goes from Minsk to Palestine to live on a collective. She promotes feminism and laments a shift in the men from self-defense to aggression

 Her friend, Else Lasker-Schuler (1869 - 1945), expressionist poet and German Jew, is in Berlin, writing, caring for her son, watching Hitler's movement take power. She goes to Jerusalem and imagines a park for Arab and Jew. Her poems, voiced from within, capture her experience. The film meditates on the violence at the root of Israel's birth: of the Nazis and of the Zionists

The film weaves together German poet Else Lasker-Schuler's journey to Palestine in the '30's with the story of a pioneering Zionist settler from Russia. In juxtaposing the two stories, the film alternates between the steamy cafes of Berlin and the arid hills near Jerusalem.

Its telling is that of broken utopias, struggle and the helplessness of struggle. When Lasker-Schuler arrives in Jerusalem, for example, she is disappointed. Gitai strips Israel's pioneers of their iconic stature and presents them as merely human, with all the human emotions of fear, doubt and hesitation.

Won 1990 Istanbul International Film Festival - Special Jury Prize

Won 1989 Venice Film Festival - Filmcritica "Bastone Bianco" Award

1989 Israel Drama, Hebrew with English and Russian subtitles
89 mins

Directed by Amos Gitai
Writing credits Amos Gitai, Gudie Lawaetz

Cast:
Lisa Kreuzer .... Else
Rivka Neuman .... Tania
Markus Stockhausen .... Ludwi)
Benjamin Levi .... Paul
Vernon Dobtcheff .... Editor
Veronica Lazare .... Secretary
Bernard Eisenschitz .... Man in Berlin cafe
Raoul Guylad .... Dr. Weintraub
Juliano Mer .... Menahme