A series of unnatural deaths and departures (almost all, of men) disrupts the lives of nine families sharing an apartment building in Jerusalem.
Land Mine, a feature length experimental documentary, forms a fragmented assembly of the portraits of the men gone, of the women who mourn them, and of the one tenant, a musician, who still lives in the building. The stories intersect at numerous points, together offering a complex image of the culture the house fostered, as well as that culture’s entropy in a land devastated by its own acts of military aggression and repression. The film offers insight into the psychological and political utility that the concept of defense serves, and into the loss of innocence and the warped moral orientation of the State of Israel.
Story elements in Land Mine are related both diegetically and as analogues. What is established as the core of the physical proximity of a handful of families -- the building they reside in -- enables a thematic proximity/association as well. The focus of the various residents’ fields of research (which include archaeology, psychiatry, literature, music, film and history), whether it is overcoming WW2 trauma and guilt, directing an insane asylum or patching the ceramic remains of a town in the aftermath of an earthquake, enacts itself through the lives of their neighbors in unforeseen ways. Together the stories become a mirror image to a society which is prey to the violence of its own defense mechanisms: its Land Mines.