Posted in: by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

‘Zaytoun’: Peace (at Least Between Two Parties) in the Middle East

Stephen Dorff

As deathbed promises go, this one will be tricky: A Palestinian orphan named Fahed (Abdallah El Akal) must return a spindly olive-tree sapling to his now-Israeli-occupied hometown to honor the wishes of his late parents. But it’s 1982, and the roughly 12-year-old Fahed is currently residing in a refugee camp in Beirut. How this kid will get out of Lebanon and into Israel during a war is not something he’s thought through.

Yet the liberal-minded nature of Zaytoun is such that not only will Fahed find a way, but his passage will also involve Israeli pilot Yoni (Stephen Dorff, late of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere), who just parachuted into Palestinian hands after bailing out of his damaged plane.

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