Initiatives of Change - ‘Lemon Tree, Very Pretty, and the Lemon Flower is Sweet’ by Andrew Stallybrass, Switzerland

Raw lemon juice sets the teeth on edge, but sweetened, it becomes a refreshing drink. Eran Riklis, an Israeli film-maker has worked with an Israeli-Palestinian, Suha Araf, to write the screen-play for a haunting film, Lemon Tree, a simple and moving parable about Israeli-Palestinian relations, but also about the human condition – and lemon juice. Inevitably, the sound track plays the Peter, Paul and Mary lyric, ‘Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet, but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.’

A simple story, about land, security, fears and displacement. ‘It's a film about people who are trapped in a political situation,’ said Riklis after the contemporary film, based loosely on true stories with a cast of Israeli and Palestinians, made its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. ‘It's a film for all audiences.’ A Palestinian woman has long been peacefully tending the lemon tree grove she inherited from her father on the Green Line that separates Israel and the occupied West Bank.

But she faces eviction and the removal of the trees so lovingly cared for over many decades when the Israeli defence minister moves in next door - and the lemon tree grove is deemed to be a security threat: terrorists could hide there. She challenges the security order in court, taking her fight all the way to the High Court of Justice.

Great films revolve around haunting images that stick in the mind’s eye long after you walk out of the cinema. And by that standard, this is a great film, for me. The green richness of the lemon orchard; the enticing glasses of home-made lemon juice that the Palestinian widow serves to her guests. I don’t want to spoil the film for you, if you get to see it. But for me, the most haunting image is of a wall.

Of course, walls can protect us. We all need walls, and limits, and protection. But walls can put us in prisons too; can be used to keep ‘us’ in and not just to keep ‘others’ out. In the South Africa of apartheid, I needed a police permit, as a white, to go into a black township. Supposedly it was for my safety, but the procedures, the hassle, discouraged most whites from finding out what life was like for their black second-class fellow-citizens, from learning about ‘them’, from building relationships with ‘the other’.

For most of my adult life, the ‘Iron Curtain’ that ‘they’ put up, stopped most contacts between the Eastern and the Western halves of our European continent. But since the wall came down, the rich West has been making it increasingly hard to get visas, to travel. The walls are going up again. ‘Good fences make good neighbours’, says a character in a Robert Frost poem. But Frost, in his own voice, goes on:
‘Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’

Perhaps we will always be building walls – and breaking them down. But let us not forget the need to be good neighbours, whether there’s a wall between us or not.

www.lemontreemovie.com/lemontree_en.html