Well, look, it’s a bad situation, this whole Israel/Palestine thing. The Israelis want to live in peace and the Palestinians don’t want them to live at all, and this is going to create some bizarre side-effects.

Like little kids living in episodes of the Twilight Zone.

In this case, a house in an area (on the West Bank?) that has been evacuated (because the Palestinians kept using it as a way to attack Israel) is still being lived in by a woman and her son. The woman is deaf—not really mute from what I could tell, despite the title, or at least mute-by-choice. Like, I think her vocal chords work, she just doesn’t use them, because (surprise!) Palestinians aren’t particularly generous with regard to handicapped people.

She lives in the house with her son who has only one arm. Apparently, and sort of refreshingly, this is a congenital defect. That is, his arm was not blown off by an errant rocket or in retaliation for some perceived slight to Mohammed. He seems like a sweet kid. He (and maybe his mother) are the only ones allowed to cross from the evacuated area into Palestine. Palestinians, possibly including his father who lives on the other side of the wall, use him to smuggle booze into Palestine where it is, of course, forbidden.

None of this would happen if the Jews wouldn’t insist on, you know, being alive.

It’s a living.

As I say, it’s a messed up situation. The sort of thing that happens when one people is expected to share a country with people who wish to kill them. This short, one bundled with two others as part of the Israel Film Festival, was interesting without being particularly enlightening.