The Stranger with the Camera

This is a riveting detective story, full of events and chases, against the background of Israeli society. A stranger, who speaks faulty Hebrew, approaches Noam and shows him a faded picture of a girl. “I don’t know her,” says Noam, even though he recognizes his friend Sweta in the picture. Sweta lives with her grandmother, called Babushka, her twin brothers and a cat named Kushka, in an apartment that can be reached by climbing a rope up to the verandah. She and her brothers studied in Russia at a school for jugglers and acrobats and came to Israel not long ago. Their father, who did not want to leave Russia, stayed behind and they have lost contact with him.

Noam, Sweta and other children in the neighborhood participate in a student cops and robbers film. It is shot in the neighborhood and while exciting chases are being staged, the children conduct a chase of their own – after the stranger walking around with a video camera, trying to take pictures of Sweta. They manage to catch him just as the filmmakers are about to shoot the scene where they catch the thief. It turns out that the stranger was asked by the father, who missed his daughter, to take pictures of her and send them to him in Russia. The mystery is solved, the shooting of the film comes to an end and everyone joins in to celebrate the Passover holiday Seder. The stranger also arrives with a bottle of wine.