Entertainment

FORGIVENESS

A good-looking American-Israeli named David returns to Israel to join the army. While on patrol, he accidentally kills a Palestinian girl.

The trauma lands him in an Israeli mental hospital filled with Holocaust survivors and built on the site of a village where Israeli troops massacred 100 Palestinians in 1948.

With the help of an experimental drug, David’s father brings him back to New York, where he falls for a Palestinian woman with a young daughter. She ditches him when she learns he was an Israeli soldier.

The story sounds straightforward enough, but the writer-

director, Udi Aloni, loses his way.

The result is a hodgepodge of plots and styles, a fault compounded by stiff acting and, except for a few scenes, wooden direction.

In Hebrew, Arabic and English, with English subtitles. Running time: 97 minutes. Not rated (violence, drug use, sex). At the Cinema Village, 12th Street, east of Fifth Avenue.