A semi-autobiographical portrait of an Israeli director grappling with creative block as he tries to bring his second feature to fruition. What was supposed to be a personal and heart-warming script about his journey from an ultra-orthodox upbringing in Jerusalem to a secular life in Tel Aviv turns into an obsessive manifesto containing thousands of pages and hundreds of hours of voice recordings dealing with Jewish identity, its problems, and possible solutions.
Three religions. Two men. One mission. Ben has gone off into the desert. In order to escape the matchmaking attempts of his family in Jerusalem, he agrees to fly to Alexandria to save what was once the largest Jewish community in the world, which is desperately short of a tenth man to celebrate Passover. When Ben misses his flight and is subsequently thrown off a bus in the Sinai Desert, a grumpy Bedouin in search of his lost camel becomes Ben’s only hope.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a language war raged in Palestine. The contenders: Yiddish, Russian, French, German, English, and Hebrew, a language barely spoken for 2000 years. This feature film tells the dramatic life story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who championed the cause of modern Hebrew.