Under The Domim Tree

A sweetly romantic teen film about the Holocaust? Well, yes, and not a bad one. Based on the autobiographical novel by Israeli actress Gila Almagor -- the sequel to her 1987 book The Summer of Aviya, also filmed by Eli Cohen -- it follows a group of Polish-Jewish adolescents relocated to an Israeli youth village in 1953. Aviya's mother (played by Almagor, who also coproduced and cowrote the screenplay) is in an asylum, and most of her friends are war orphans. Together they fall in love, bicker, study, try to track down the remnants of their scattered families and forget the war that haunts their dreams. The kibbutz's domim (crab apple) tree is where t...