The Fifth Heaven

About The Film

In this sensitive coming-of-age drama, a teenage orphan struggles to adjust to a new life amidst other exiles in a British-controlled Palestine on the brink of transformation. Deserted by her America-bound mother and remarried father, 13-year-old Maya (Amit Moshkovitz) is deposited at an orphanage for Jewish girls on the outskirts of Tel Aviv in the summer of 1944. The trauma of war shows in the faces of the malnourished girls and lonely routines of their adult supervisors who await liberation from personal and national isolation. Smitten with Maya, the director of the orphanage (Yehezkel Lazarov) conjures memories of a tortured love affair while Maya develops forbidden feelings for an anti-British resistance fighter who is the fiancé of an orphanage worker. Adapted from Rachel Eytan’s richly observed autographical novel, THE FIFTH HEAVEN was nominated for five Israeli Academy Awards.