Under the Domim Tree
| Under the Domim Tree | |
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Film poster
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| Directed by | Eli Cohen |
| Produced by |
Gila Almagor Eitan Evan |
| Written by | Gila Almagor Eyal Sher Eli Cohen |
| Starring | Gila Almagor |
| Cinematography | David Gurfinkel |
| Edited by | Danny Shick |
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Release date
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Running time
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102 minutes |
| Country | Israel |
| Language | Hebrew |
Under the Domim Tree (Hebrew: עץ הדומים תפוס, translit. Etz Hadomim Tafus) is a 1994 Israeli film based on the 1992 book of the same name by Gila Almagor. The film was directed by Eli Cohen, and screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.
Both the book and the film are sequels to Almagor's 1985 autobiographical book, Summer of Aviya, about the protagonist's childhood in the 1950s in Israel.
Under the Domim Tree tells of Aviya's years in the Oudim boarding school and about the relations that are formed between the Israeli-born students and the students who survived the holocaust.
The film follows the lives and struggles of several teenagers, focusing on Aviya, an Israeli sabra whose father was killed in 1939 in Israel and whose mother suffers from mental illness. The youths, most Holocaust survivors and all orphans, live in a communal farming village.
In the opening scene, set in the winter of 1953, a large group of adults and teenagers are shown searching for Misha, a young boy from the boarding house. He is eventually found drowned in a river. It quickly becomes apparent that he, along with Yurek and Ze'evik, had regularly run through the woods at night, a result of having hidden in the forest for two years during the Holocaust. Yurek and Ze'evik cease this behavior temporarily, to the relief of the headmasters and their peers, before resuming it several months later.
A new girl, Miriam "Mira" Segal, arrives at the boarding house in spring. She proves uncooperative with the living arrangements and is openly hostile at times, drawing ire from the other girls.
Aviya still hopes that her mother, Henya, who has been institutionalized for years, will recover and regularly visits the hospital where Henya lives. Henya believed she had been in Europe during the Holocaust even though she and her husband had left prior to the war. She later becomes romantically involved with Yurek, whose behavior she is concerned for but does not question. Both, along with Ze'evik, frequently take comfort in sitting under the domim (crab apple) tree near the boarding house.
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