Lemon Tree (G)
Director: Eran Riklis
Running time: 106 mins

Veteran Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis’ new film recently screened as part of the 2008 Melbourne International Film Festival’s Border Patrol package of fictional films concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian question.

Lemon Tree, now in narrow release, examines this vexed subject matter by focusing on a microcosmic conflict.

Salma Zidane is a poor Palestinian widow who tends to a lemon grove abutting the property of her new neighbours, Israel’s Defense Minister and his wife. Notwithstanding that a wall being built between Israel and the West Bank is ultimately destined to separate the two properties, Israel’s security forces insist that Salma’s lemon trees be uprooted in the interests of Israeli national security.

The Minister ratifies the orchard’s destruction against a backdrop of increasing conjugal unease, and soon, his lonely wife comes to sympathise with her distraught neighbour’s plight.

Salma, wholly dependent upon the lemon grove to sustain her, acts on legal counsel from a handsome and worldly lawyer to whom she feels an attraction; the attraction is mutual, albeit culturally unacceptable. An unassuming but engrossing underdog/courtroom/forbidden love drama thus unfolds - with the whole world watching.

While Lemon Tree is an affecting film on a dramatic level, its allegorical content can’t be ignored: the Defense Minister’s name is even Israel! While the film riffs confidently on border issues, it pussyfoots around some secondary story strands. This doesn’t detract greatly, however, from a film filled with excellent performances, elevated by a few surprising and effective expressionistic flourishes, and which finishes strongly. ◙

Lemon Tree is now showing in selected cinemas