MESSENGERS OF PEACE (2000, 52min)

On November 16th 1999, fifty mentally disabled athletes from Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority attended a “Peace camp”: three days of joint sports training in a non-competitive environment.It was a meeting between former enemies, bound together by a common fate of being labeled “different”.

It was also the starting point of this film, which follows the lives of two Israeli athletes who participated in the camp: Elinor Linik, a 24 year old champion swimmer who has Down’s syndrome, and Yohai Shemtov, a 20-year-old soccer player who is a mentally disabled schizophrenic.

Throughout their three day experience, we captured Elinor and Yohai as they ran the gamut of emotions - excitement, distrust, curiosity, and anxiety. We now plan to continue filming the two throughout an entire year, as they train and prepare for the Regional Peace games for the mentally disabled, scheduled to take place in Bethlehem in November 2000.

We thus intend to show not only Elinor’s talent and tenacity as a swimmer, but also the personal hardships she endures. Among these are coming to terms with the parents who abandoned her at birth, and overcoming loneliness and a broken heart after a failed relationship with a man who also has Down’s syndrome.

Yohai, for his part, will take us into the psychiatric institute where he lives and open us to a world of violent attacks, isolation chambers and sedation drugs. Both Elinor and Yohai claim sports helps them “gain confidence” and allows them to feel “like everybody else”.

And it is through their shared love of sports that Elinor, Yohai and fellow-athletes from neighboring Arab countries take a small yet tangible step towards long awaited peace in the Middle East.