When Adi Hertzberg, 26, learns that his childhood best friend Rueben has died, he returns from self-imposed exile in Sydney to Melbourne's tight-knit Jewish community, a world he has spent years avoiding. As kids, Adi, Rueben, and Maya were inseparable: bandmates, football teammates, grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. But while Rueben wore his Jewish identity defiantly, Adi learned to shrink from it.
Through flashbacks, we witness the trio navigating schoolyard antisemitism, intergenerational trauma, and the quiet strength of grandparents who survived Auschwitz and the Farhud. When violent harassment forces Maya's family to flee their business, and Adi transfers to a private school, the band fractures. Adi distances himself. Rueben does not.
In the present, Adi reconnects with Maya and discovers that Rueben's music career and life collapsed after being publicly doxxed and ostracised for being openly Jewish. Consumed by guilt and unresolved shame, Adi sets out to confront a former classmate he blames for everything, while his father quietly removes the mezuzah from their door out of fear.
As grief, love, and memory collide, Adi must choose between revenge and responsibility. To honour Rueben, he must decide whether to keep hiding or reclaim the identity his grandparents fought to preserve amid rising antisemitism in contemporary Australia.
Empathy happens quickly through storytelling and now is the time to promote Jewish voices.— Gideon Heine, Writer / Director
