Misafa Lesafa

“A man who loses his mother tongue is crippled for life,” says the writer Aharon Appelfeld. This is a phrase that can resonate with each immigrant as well as their children who can also identify with the discomfort and shame expressed by the singer Chaim Uliel when he speaks of his Moroccan parent’s foreign accent. Accounting from their own history, nine people – poets, writers, singers – recall their experiences of moving from one language to another. The film describes this intimate link, often ambivalent and conflicted, as woven between the learnt and adopted Hebrew language and the language of childhood, one that is “like breast milk.”