Dead Season Visitor

Guest in the Dead Season - Feature, Israel 1970

Director: Moshe Mizrahi

This is Moshe Mizrahi's first feature film.

The film, an Israeli-French co-production, was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Bear Award in 1970.

The film deals with a German officer (Hans Christian Blech) who was the commander of a concentration camp near the city of Lyon. At the end of the war he pretended to be a Jew and immigrated to Israel in order to avoid prosecution for his crimes. 

In Israel he fell in love with an Israeli girl of Jewish-Yemenite origin and together they ran a small hotel in Eilat. Twenty years later, when a French guest arrives at the hotel, the officer fears that the Frenchman was a prisoner in the camp and that he might identify him and turn him over. Terrified at being discovered, he kills the stranger.