Synopsis

A timely hybrid documentary about displacement, resilience, and the fragile yearning for an ordinary life.

On Israel’s northern border, the residents of Kibbutz Dan have built a peaceful life between the mountains and the river, always under the threat of war. Following the terror and fear of the October 7 attacks, the community is abruptly evacuated, while security team members Rotem and Stav remain behind under fire to protect their home. Awaiting the birth of their first child, they face a deeply personal question: how do you bring a new life into a place where the future feels uncertain?

Through a children’s book, a stage play, historical fragments, and poetic animation, the film captures the community’s reality of life on the border and its yearning for the peace it once knew, a life repeatedly broken and threatened by war.

Blending documentary, archival footage, narrative film, and animation, BORDER is a portrait of home and belonging on a border where ordinary life is always lived in the shadow of conflict.

Director

Judy Herbstein is a documentary film director, photographer, researcher, and producer with a MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, and another master’s degree in cinema from the Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She has lived and made news stories and documentary films in the United States, South Africa, and Israel. She won an Emmy Award for producing a series of video pieces for “The News Hour”, PBS filmed in Hebron (1996). In recent years she has been living in the North of Israel. She teaches filmmaking alongside continuing her work as a creative artist.

immigrantion

Border