Noemi Schory

The story of Ágnes Keleti, a sporting legend who defeated both her rivals and the existential threats to a Jew living through the turmoil of the 20th century.

Salman Schocken was the King of department stores in Germany. Before WWII, he owned 22 department stores with 6,000 employees. He possessed a unique collection of 60,000 rare books in German and Hebrew and founded a modern, Jewish publishing house. He was the lifelong supporter of Shmuel Yosef Agnon and he owned the Haaretz newspaper which still survives on the border of consensus. He supported secular, Jewish culture and identified with humanist, liberal Judaism, a relic of 19th century Europe. Today, in an age of unscrupulous market economy and militant Judaism, Salman Schocken’s ways point to an alternative, perhaps not entirely lost.

Osnat is a teenage girl living with Down’s Syndrome who is fighting for her place in society, and her future. She does not get on with her peers, some of whom are prejudiced against individuals with special needs, whilst her mother makes sure all the others are kept at bay. The mother, a successful lawyer, has little patience for her daughter and her sort. One weekend, the pair head off to the countryside where Osnat’s grandmother lives. Uneducated and superstitious, Osnat’s mother is every bit as disdainful of her own mother as she is of her daughter. When a magician passes through the village, for a brief moment it seems as if the relationship between the three generations of women is about to turn a corner; however, the magician ends up disappearing as cryptically as he had appeared, leaving mother, daughter, and grandmother to find their own path to happiness.

In the picturesque Israeli Negev desert lays the Bedouin Village of El-Sayed. It has the largest percentage of deaf people in the world yet, no hearing aids can be seen because in El-Sayed deafness is not a handicap. The tranquility of the village is interrupted by Salim El-Sayed's decision to change his deaf son's fate using the Cochlear Implant Operation. This bionic implanted chip, that can make deaf people hear, is slowly reaching more secluded areas, even to El-Sayed which has neither paved roads nor electricity. Salim's decision is evoking great conflict in the village threatening the tradition of coexistence between deaf and hearing.