“It’s a holiday,” Rochale says to her husband Zvika before everybody arrives, “and I want it to be a lively occasion.” And, indeed, in the yard of their house in a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley, everything is ready for the Independence Day party. The lawn has seen better days. So has the family… Their son, who grew up here and left, is home for the holiday, on a visit from Berlin with a guest his parents didn’t expect. And he, who hasn’t been here in four years, doesn’t expect to see his grandmother so frail and attended by a foreign carer, nor his mythological lover, who will drop in for a surprise visit. On the home front, as on the front, there is tension. The jets flying in the Valley skies and the news broadcasts from the other room “challenge” everyone present… Into the small hours, in the smoke of the barbecue grill and the good old songs, everything will come to the surface. And things will become very “lively”…
In On the Grill, Dror Keren, a native of the Jezreel Valley, returns to the landscapes of his childhood, and on one highly charged night, Israel’s Independence Day, he brings about a confrontation between parents and children, between the founding generation and the younger generation, between the home we dreamed of and what it is today…