Cellulo Prod

In the north of Israel, Nagham, a Palestinian girl, decides to return to Bir’em, her family’s village, which was destroyed during the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. The teenager spends the summer reconnecting with memories of her grandfather.

Who and what is stirring in Water Lily Split? Children. And their mother. The lapping waves, the sound of crickets, the fire and the bottom of a swimming pool-turned-pond, and a giant shell which brings back memories. In just a few shots, Grégoire Perrier sketches a delicate path leading to Basile and Hortense, brother and sister in their early years, on the brink of language, its emergence, and its invention. He registers the epiphenomena that punctuate their daily lives and offers us vignettes of a childhood that radiates before our eyes, in all its anger, its games, its demands.

The director engages in a dialogue with his older brother, once convicted of drug trafficking in French Guiana. Oscillating between the present and past recorded in his diary, the film opens the door to a rapprochement between the two men.