Children of Peace

Director Maayan Schwartz is 35 and grew up together with Jewish and Arab children in the village of Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam, a utopian experiment created by a French Jew who converted to Catholicism. In this very personal debut film, a collage of modern-day interviews, archive material and old home videos, he is reunited with his childhood friends. They talk about hopes, awakening from an idyllic childhood, the initial dissonance experienced when the many young Jewish men joined the army; alienation, when the Arabs who grew up in the village are attacked, renewed rapprochement and fresh perspectives. To begin, he presented the resulting work in his home village, afterwards commenting in an interview with a local website: "A place like this necessarily acquires a large amount of ambivalence among its residents. There was a large dose of naivety in our parents’ generation. It was that naivety that enabled this place to exist… Everyone who came here thought they were coming to ‘live in peace’ but instead they had to deal with conflict all the time. WASNS (Wahat al-Salam - Neve Shalom) is not a bubble in some ‘real world’ - it is reality. In Israel, you can live in a homogenous place or neighborhood and never meet people who are not just like you. Here, you interact daily with the ’others,’ and for better or worse, that creates a complex situation.”

Text: Jörg Taszman
English: Peter Rickerby