Synopsis

The dramatic encounter between Israeli reporter Adam Baruch and Israeli General Shmuel “Gorodish” Gonen in the jungles of the Central African Republic. “Gorodish” had gone into voluntary exile in Africa after being blamed for Israel’s military failures in the Yom Kippur War, turning him overnight from a national hero to a reviled man.

****

1987. Adam Baruch, a senior editor at the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonot, decides to travel to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, in order to write the article of a lifetime, interviewing Israeli General Shmuel “Gorodish” Gonen, his own childhood hero. “Gorodish” believes that the accusations against him, after the Yom Kippur War, were politically motivated and that the establishment decided to use him as a scapegoat in order to satisfy the public thirst to identify culprits responsible for the failure of the war.
In a packed three-day visit to the chaotic city of Bangui, in the jungle, and in an abandoned diamond mine far from human settlement, Adam finds “Gorodish”‘, The former general is now a slightly modified version of Colonel Kutz from Apocalypse Now: broken, abandoned and alone. Gorodish hopes to find diamonds in order to finance his return to Israel, fight for his innocence, and avenge the injustice he has suffered. In reality, though, he is heavily in debt, bitter, and driven by an irrational lust for revenge. He moves mountains and rivers in his fight, but all the time he is slowly dying in his own bitter, supernatural world, godforsaken and friendless. He is not a businessman and knows nothing about diamonds. War is his expertise. Adam struggles to understand the conflicted soul of his former hero and a man who served as a role model for generations of young Israelis. They spend three days together on a journey that initially has the character of a duel, and later becomes an encounter between two men who deconstruct their self-images. The story reaches its climax by the banks of the river that surrounds the diamond mine. Gorodish experiences a feverish flashback of the crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973, when he sank along with his soldiers. Far away from their home in Israel, the two men expose the character of Israeli society, which exploits its heroes and ultimately abandons them on the battlefield of life.

The script was developed with the support of the Israel Film Fund
The film producing with the support of the Israeli Film Fund and the Gesher Multicultural Film Fund.