In deconstructing the world famous ‘Jaffa oranges’ brand and probing its iconographic history director, Eyal Sivan delves into orientalist fantasies of the Holy Land and the Zionist promise of a “desert” that colonists would be bringing to “bloom”. Sivan uses photographic and filmic archives, poems and paintings, to narrate the history that goes back to a once economically thriving Arab Jaffa, whose prolific and profit-generating orange groves attracted local and neighboring labor in droves for picking, packaging and export. After the Nakba and the expulsion of the Palestinian population, the Israeli state rebranded ‘Jaffa’ as a symbol of an Arab-free Israel. Sivan interviews historians, political analysts and workers, retracing how an orange harvest, once the site of a cooperation, transformed gradually into a symbol of the escalating conflict and war.

Born in Haifa, in 1964, Eyal Sivan has been living between France and Israel since 1985. Known for his controversial films, Sivan directed more than 10 worldwide awarded political documentaries and produced many others. He is the founder and artistic director of the Paris-based documentary films production company momento! and the film distribution agency Scalpel. He is the founder and chief editor of South Cinema Notebooks, a journal of cinema and political critic edited by the Sapir Academic College in Israel where he lectures regularly. Presently Sivan in an Honorary Fellow at University of Exeter UK, he also teaches at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam and s member of the editorial board of the Paris-based publishing house La Fabrique Editions. His filmography includes: Aqabat-Jaber, Passing Through (1987), He Will Overcome (1993), The Specialist (1999), Route 181, Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel (co-directed with Michel Khleifi, 2003), I Love You All (2004), Common State, Potential Conversation (2012).