That knock on the door

Late night, September 1997, a force of the commando marches into a deadly ambush in Lebanon. 11 of them are killed, the body of one remains behind - my brother, Itamar. 25 years after Itamar was killed the camera is turning backwards. "That Knock on the Door" is not a memory film, but a film about memory. About hoe we as a society in Israel remember, alone and together, and about how we lose. Through the film we meet the informers: volunteers who go through a professional training process that prepares them to deliver the terrible news, that the end point of their reserve service is to knock on another family's door. We know the casualty officers, women of different ages and different positions who enter the homes of the bereaved families in uniform, who change positions every few months, then they are replaced by new casualty officers. And we meet the bereaved father and the bereaved mother as we have never met them before: after the house is emptied of the Memorial Day guests, in the hours when the house rises for another memorial. The bereaved parents who are Itamar's father and mother and my father and mother in our childhood home in Arad. The desert landscape blends into the silence and emptiness left after Itamar was declared missing. The process of exposure that the film accompanies brings to the surface the journey of growing up that I left behind. The two faces of loss, the personal and the public, present an original portrait of bereavement.