The Fig Tree

We read of the problems Ethiopian Jewish refugees face in Israel. This powerful, poignant love story limns the problems that require that refuge and encourage them to make that risky sacrifice. 

  There are few signs of Judaism in this film: the Hebrew on Mina’s T-shirt, a chain, the memory of a rabbi ancestor, the eternal drive to the homeland. The dominant religious emblem is the friend’s ceremonial robe with cross. 

The titular fig tree is redolent of Biblical associations, perhaps primarily of fertility in the desert. But here it’s an ambivalent symbol. It’s where 16-year-old Jewish Mina meets her Christian boyfriend Eli, who hides there from the troops determined to kidnap him into the civil war. The virgin lovers frolic around its twisted, arid limbs. It’s also where they find the legless war veteran, determined to kill himself. They manage to prolong his agony, aka life.

Mina’s brother is home from the war, short one hand. She massages his stump to restore life. 

The Jewishness that pervades the film is the overall compassion for the refugee, of whatever nation, whatever need, here centered on its compelling source. In a more personal form of that emotion, Mina tries to sacrifice her own salvation to save her Christian lover.
       Writer-director Aalam-Warqe Davidian based her script on her own childhood experiences in the civil war there. We can tell.