Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident
outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities,
and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day.
Five-year-old
Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the
outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a
semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to
the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to
different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing,
others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn
Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed
it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic
obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the
wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the
military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of
Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the
stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives
and histories unexpectedly converge.
In
A Day in the Life of Abed
Salama, Nathan
Thrall—hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom”
(Time)—offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over
Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and
reality of one of the most contested places on earth.