Le film raconte l’histoire de Deir Yassin, village arabe conquis après une bataille très controversée en 1948, et transformé en 1951 en hôpital psychiatrique appartenant au gouvernement israélien.

Aujourd’hui, on n’a pas accès à Deir Yassin ni aux photos répertoriées dans les archives de l’Armée de défense d’Israël.
C’est une tache sur le passé d’Israël, dont personne n’aime parler.

Le film présente le récit du point de vue israélien de l’histoire de Deir Yassin, aboutissant à un exode massif de résidents arabes et considéré comme le début du problème des réfugiés palestiniens.

There is also no access to the classified photographs locked away in the archives of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which show the massacre that occurred in that pivotal battle.

Deir Yassin is a stain on Israel’s past, that no one likes to talk about or acknowledge.

This film insists on showing Deir Yassin to tell the story of this cursed piece of land in its various incarnations over the past century.

Dror Nissan is trying to trace his past. He arrives at the mental hospital to receive his mother’s medical records. She was a paranoid-schizophrenic patient who was hospitalized there from the 1950s until her death. He was taken from her at birth.

The journey Dror sets out on to discover the secrets of his past parallels to the journey which we, the filmmakers, embark on to discover the secrets of our founding fathers, those who conquered Deir Yassin. The revisionist underground fighters who occupied the village are documented here for the first time, along with the spies who were sent to follow them from the opposition, and the undertakers – the youngsters who were sent to « mop up » the aftermath.

Through their often contradicting memories we disclose the Israeli narrative of Deir Yassin, a traumatic massacre or a heroic, pivotal battle, resulting in a mass exodus of Arab residents which was considered the beginning of the Palestinian refugee problem.