Waking Lions

After an exhausting night shift, Dr. Eytan Green leaves the Beersheva hospital where he works, gets into his luxurious SUV and speeds down a deserted Negev road. When he hits someone, he is horrified to discover that the injured man, an Eritrean migrant, has no chance of surviving, and he flees the scene. He goes home to his wife Liat–a high-ranking police investigator–and their two sons, to carry on with his life as if nothing had happened. But his life turns upside down the next morning when a young black woman knocks at the door. She is the dead man’s widow and Eytan realizes that she knows what has happened. At first, he thinks that she wants money; in fact, she wants something quite different. In a deserted garage deep in the desert, she forces him to give free medical assistance to sick and wounded people who have infiltrated into Israel from Africa and cannot afford to go to a doctor or a hospital. Eytan’s fate is now in the hands of this beautiful, strong woman who both attracts and repels him.

Interlaced with extortion and power struggles, this is a suspenseful social and moral drama; a story of intimacy at the heart of alienation, and of erotic attraction between opposites. But it is also the story of a single choice, a specific moment that makes a man open his eyes and ask, “Who am I, actually?” Ayelet Gundar-Goshen takes an unrelenting look at the darkest corners of Israeli society and of the human soul. And the reader, whoever he or she may be, will ask, “What would I do in this situation?”