This film is incidentally not an adaptation of Dave Eggers's reportage study Zeitoun (2009), about the innocent Syrian-American Abdulrahman Zeitoun, notoriously arrested on suspicions of terrorism during Hurricane Katrina, while trying to rescue people in his canoe. It's a well-intentioned but contrived and unconvincing film, from the Israeli director Eran Riklis; it is set in Beirut, 1982, in the era of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. A young Palestinian boy, Fahed (Abdallah El Akal), finds himself guarding an Israeli air force pilot, Yoni (Stephen Dorff), whose plane has crashed; the intention is to turn him over to the PLO. Fahed is overwhelmed with a passionate need to see his Palestinian homeland just once, and plant on this soil his father's tiny and carefully tended olive tree (the film's title is the Arabic for "olive") – so he secretly frees Yoni while keeping him shackled, cutting a deal: Yoni can escape home across country, if he will take Fahed and the little olive tree with him. They make their break for the border, a mixture of Chaplin and the Kid, and Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones. Of course, this odd couple come to see each other's humanity. It's quite a sweet idea, with a liberal attempt at balance, though Palestinian audiences may query the idea of making their half of this equation a child, and Fahed's motivation for defying his elders in quite so disloyal and dangerous a way, is never convincingly explained.