BENEATH THE SILENCE

Israel 1973. SIx years after the Six Day War, Menashe is still deeply traumatized by his experiences as a soldier. He withdraws from society and spends hours aimlessly driving around in his red pick-up. Menashe's young wife Daphna and their 10-year old son Shlomi suffer under his silence and rejection. Daphna tries to get through to her husband and bring him back into the family. She evens starts a row with the military authorities and fights bitterly for some support. But neither history nor big institutions take individual cases into account. When the Yom Kipper War breaks out, Menashe has to go back into battle – and his life and family threaten to finally fall apart.

“In the 70s, people who returned from the war with the phenomenon of “shell shock” were not yet diagnosed as people suffering from PTSD. People were forced to hide what they were going through, whether it was shame or a lack of knowledge and understanding about what the problem was. Some of them went to sleep at night with the hope that they would wake up "normal" the next morning.

This situation caused those fighters to draw inward and hide the disease and this concealment led to them being considered as a crazy person. So without reason or explanation they are perceived by society as eccentric people who don't adhere to the norm. In our opinion, despite fifty years having passed since then and the awareness, care and attention having improved in these years, the government still makes the shell-shocked feel like outcasts, because the fact is that there are still a lot of soldiers with PTSD in the closet who refuse to come out and admit what they are going through. And the state, rather than to go and look for them and take real responsibility, is satisfied to sit around and wait for them to come to it.The film is not an autobiographical film, but it is a very personal film that touches the scars of our childhood experiences."

Erez Mizrahi and Sahar Shavit