AVRUM'S VISION - trailer for a documentary film in progress

*** Work on this film is in-progress. More information here:

https://www.thefilmcollaborative.org/fiscalsponsorship/projects/avrumsvision

AVRUM'S VISION

Unable to stomach the moral compromises required to stay in power, a popular Israeli politician quits government and begins fiercely speaking uncomfortable truths to his people, at great personal cost.

AVRUM’S VISION is about truth-telling no matter the cost; the shared humanity of adversaries; and the possibility of transformation––in a person, and in a people. It’s the story of Avrum Burg, a former, ultra-popular Speaker of the Israeli parliament (Knesset) who became a pariah for daring to challenge foundational narratives of the state.

Born into Israel’s political elite––his father was one of the country’s founders and a prominent government member for decades––Avrum was once seen as a future prime minister. But after years spent witnessing how power operates - especially the way fear, trauma, and nationalism often drive Israeli policy - he left government and began speaking out, insisting that Israelis have not yet dealt with the traumas of the Holocaust and of Exile, and must begin to. These traumas, says Avrum, have calcified into a hardened identity that justifies occupation, violence, and moral disengagement. Central to his message is the belief that healing can only begin when Israelis acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians.

Because it is delivered by someone hailing from the very heart of the establishment, Avrum’s message is difficult for Israelis to simply ignore. Revered by few but reviled, shunned and perhaps feared by many, his commitment to coexistence remains unshaken. In 1929, during the Hebron massacre in which marauding groups of Arabs murdered dozens of Jews, his mother, then nine years old, was saved along with her family by her Palestinian neighbor, an older man who saw them not as enemies but as kin. Avrum views it as his responsibility to honor this spark of shared humanity which he refuses to pronounce dead.

Can a country born out of trauma ever be whole? Can two peoples, shaped by mutual trauma, religious fervor, and dueling mythologies, reconcile? Can they confront the past honestly enough to imagine a shared future?