Return to Haifa

A moving drama based on Ghassan Kanafani's novel of the same name, which takes place in 1967, almost two decades after the Nakba. Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple displaced from Haifa in 1948, visit their former home. Miriam, a Holocaust survivor and now a citizen of Israel, who lives there, lets them in. She and her husband took up residence there shortly after the Palestinian couple were evicted. The heroes return to Haifa in the hope of learning something about their son Khaldun, whom they left at home one April morning in 1948, not realizing that neither of them will be able to return there anymore. They soon discover that the abandoned infant was adopted by Miriam and her husband, who gave him his Hebrew name — Dov. Today, the young man is a soldier of the Israeli army. Their meeting confronts all three with a painful, shared history, raising questions about loss, displacement, identity and responsibility, and revealing the enduring, human consequences of the Nakba.