Soda

In 1956, a seamstress moves with her daughter into a community of Holocaust survivors who have made a new home for themselves in Israel. Rumours surface about her past as a Kapo in Auschwitz concentration camp. Resistance fighter Shalom is torn between his affection for her and his duty to uncover her past. Soda (Hebrew for ‘her secret’) also deals with topography, but in a completely different way than Schweigend steht der Wald. Here, it is not the perpetrator's country that harbours the repressed traces of the past, but the new home in Israel that becomes the stage for a moral conflict. Geographical distance proves deceptive – even far away, the survivors are caught up in their past. The film shows a community torn apart by mutual mistrust, wrestling with the question of whether forgiveness is possible or whether guilt remains indelible. (T.E.-H./F.S.)