Jerusalem Film Festival Opens with a Haunting World Premiere

The Old City's ramparts glowed amber as the world premiere of "Salted Earth" drew Israel's film community to Jerusalem for the opening of the 43rd festival. First-time director Dina Amir has made a film that the audience received with a standing ovation and — in several rows — visible tears.

The film follows three generations of a Mizrahi family in Jaffa, from a grandmother who arrived from Casablanca in 1952, to a mother who navigated the fraught identity politics of the 1980s, to a daughter who now lives between Tel Aviv and Berlin, unsure where she belongs.

Amir spent seven years making the film, much of it in her family's apartment where her grandmother still lives. "I wanted to make a film about forgetting," she said at the post-screening Q&A. "About what a people carry and what they put down."