Synopsis
My Dream House opens with Israeli famous poem:
“In my dream House on top of a hill, I’ll build a large fire - place in which a fire will always burn..”
The poem continues to beautifully describe the fantasy: “The vine will climb from the vineyard to my white dream house..” and so it continues. Too few remember the last verse “I don’t know anything about my Dream House, like my dreams it is dark and closed….maybe just neglected and abandoned walls…”
Kalman was born to Holocaust survivors in a refugee camp in Cyprus after World War II, his first house in Israel was a house left by the Arab community in Haifa.
Zaki is the son of Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their village in the Israeli War of Independence, the Palestinian Naqba of 1948. He and his family live only few miles away from the ruins of their former home.
Michal, daughter of Israeli settlers in Sinai, saw the buldozers destroy her beloved home during the evacuation from Sinai in 1982 and Rina never had a private home in the Kibbutz where she grew up.
Four families, four stories, and four houses make it possible to discuss the ideal House, the House as a concept, as a memory and maybe as a kind of solution. The construction of the house forces our builders to deal with their identity, with their past and with the strange hope that the house will make everything warmer, and safer.