THE FUSE

Israel’s mostly Arabic-language international feature submission “The Sea” offers a deceptively simple premise: a headstrong 12-year-old boy from a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank illegally enters Israel on his own to see the sea. Without being judgmental, director-writer Shai Carmeli Pollak uses this foundation to expose painful realities of the occupation, as well as the indifference to them displayed by many of those in Tel Aviv’s urban “bubble.” Made as a collaboration between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, the film becomes a deeply humanist tale about borders, permits, the interdependent economies of two neighbors and the power of the dominant language. Menemsha Films is distributing in the U.S.