A sensitive teenager living in a poor Tel Aviv suburb grapples with a range of pressures in his neighborhood—both personal and social. Nissim Dayan on his film: “First and foremost, it’s important for me to emphasize that I’m a local patriot; I have no mixed feelings about Tel Aviv. I made this film in the neighborhood out of genuine love for it, for its people, and for what it symbolizes to me…” The film, considered a pioneer of Israeli political cinema, draws heavily on 1960s Italian cinema (Pazolini’s *Accattone*, for example), known as the second generation of Italian neorealism.
