Review: The past informs the future of the documentary ‘The Ruins of Lifta’

On the western entrance to Jerusalem lies the only abandoned Palestinian village from the 1948 war that hasn’t been developed or repopulated by Jews. In the personalized documentary from Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky, “The Ruins of Lifta,” Daum acts as a thoughtful onscreen guide to what the picturesque hillsides and its stone remains represent.

For its expelled inhabitants, it’s a lasting memory of better times, but it’s also a serene, painful marker for Arabs and Jews with competing narratives of rootlessness, conflict and occupation. Then there’s what Lifta might become, if Israel follows through on announced plans to build luxury villas there, which has sparked protests from an Israeli-Palestinian coalition hoping to preserve it as a historical site.

Daum, an Orthodox Jew, Brooklynite and descendant of Holocaust survivors, compassionately engages with Palestinians and a historian over the circumstances of Lifta’s Arab residents — complicating his own heroic view of a tough, secretive uncle who fought with the underground Jewish militia in the 1940s that targeted Brits and Arabs.

He finds especially soulful discourse with a displaced Liftawi named Yacoub Odeh, active in the coalition, and outspoken about his view of Israel as bad-faith occupiers. Daum idealistically arranges a getting-to-know-you meeting between Yacoub and an elderly friend and Holocaust survivor named Dasha Rittenberg, with Lifta as a backdrop. Watching these sturdy carriers of suffering inevitably argue, your spirits may sink. But you also can’t help but notice that the rocky terrain requires them at times to hold on to each other.

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‘The Ruins of Lifta’

In English and Hebrew with English subtitles

Running time: 1 hour, 17 minutes

Not rated

Playing: Laemmle Town Center 5, Encino

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