Cinema
Upon the Ruins
מעל החורבות
Nathan Axelrod · 1938
Synopsis
Sixty adolescents from Germany arrive at the youth village of Nahalat Ahim and do not mix with the young people born in the country. When the counsellor asks why, a girl answers that their parents are in concentration camps in Germany. He then tells them a story two thousand years old, which takes up most of the film: in a Jewish village in Upper Galilee, the pupil Elhanan sees a horseman announce the arrival of the Romans; the village chief, Yehuda, chooses to fight, and women and children go to hide in a cave with the young Avshalom.
Context
The film adapts a children's book by Zvi Liberman. Axelrod directed it with Alfred Wolf, a stage director of the Ohel theatre; neither had any film experience. The Ohel actors were joined by young people from the Montefiore district, where the studio was, and pupils from the Borochov school in Givatayim, among them Amnon Karmi, who plays Elhanan and fell in battle on Radar Hill on 26 May 1948. The Roman army is played by the footballers of Hapoel Tel Aviv. The disturbances forced the shooting to be interrupted near Gedera and then Degania, and it ended at the Shuni fortress. The premiere took place at the Migdalor cinema on 9 July 1938.
Who it is for
A fiction of about an hour in Hebrew, viewable with English subtitles. It helps to know that many of the teenagers seen in it were real pupils, filmed in their own school.
Prizes and reception
Premiere in the presence of the mayor of Tel Aviv and Saul Tchernikovsky; restored by Yaakov Gross for the Jerusalem festival in 2003.