SYNOPSIS

"Hide ansd Seek" is the first Israeli feature film to deal with homosexuality.
Set in British Mandate Palestine (1948), "Hide and Seek" portrays the relationship between Uri, a twelve-year-old boy, and Balaban, his teacher.
While Uri's parents are away and involved in underground activities against the British occupation, there is a growing suspicion of an informer among the Jews. When Uri watches Balaban meeting and exchanging letters with an Arab, he reports Balaban as a spy. Only later does he discover that Balaban is not an agent of the British but the homosexual lover of the Arab. "Hide and Seek" thus becomes a remarkable study of the inability of a siege state to tolerate difference and a study of the private anguish of an individual with the external pressures and political events of the times.

AWARDS

1979 "The Silver Rose" award for Best film, Best Director, and Best script.
1979 Berlin Film Festival

REVIEWS

The film not only deals with taboos, but does it with graceful simplicity and subtlety I have not seen in any other Israeli movie... Wolman's drama is one of those rare films – like  Truffaut's THE 400 BLOWS – that eloquently shows the traumas of childhood, but in HIDE AND SEEK something of the trauma is the birth of a nation, as well.