Ghetto

Whoever is not afraid of the face of the monster is said to resemble it. The possible extension of the maxim is, to get used to horror, to be frightened by beauty.. - Manos Hatzidakis

In 1943 Warsaw, young Samuel Cohen survives the annihilation of the Jewish ghetto after his mother, Miriam, sacrifices herself in a grenade blast to resist Nazi officer Friedrich Vogel. Her defiance allows Samuel to flee through tunnels to freedom, haunted by loss but carrying her legacy of survival.

Eighty years later in 2023 Gaza, Samuel’s grandson—Samuel Cohen, now an Israeli commander—orders a military assault on a blockaded Palestinian enclave encircled by a towering wall. Once a descendant of Holocaust victims, he now mirrors the oppressors his grandfather feared, dehumanising trapped civilians as “vermin.”