Apples of the Golan

The part of Israel and Syria where apple is the people’s bomb. Apples of the Golan is an epic story of a village turned prison full of rappers, rockers and regimes, salsa dancers, holy men and dead fish, traitors, lovers, freedom fighters and their heartbroken mothers, all set against the backdrop of the revolution raging in their homeland Syria, creeping through the orchards toward their homes in Israel. In 1967 Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria. Before the occupation there were 139 Arab villages in the region. Only five remain today. 130,000 Syrian Arabs were permanently forced out of their homes. This film tells a story of one of these villages, Majdal Shams, and its inhabitants' struggle for survival. They are too few to fight. The apples are the bombs with which they fight the occupation. Their trees root them to the land; they will not be moved. Israel is their home, Syria their homeland. Neither is paradise.