In 1980 Gitai traveled to a small valley outside of Haifa, Wadi Rushmia, to document the lives of Jewish and Arab squatters living side by side on the margins of Israeli society. Surviving in homes scavenged from the city's debris, they eke out a living, and in some ways are refugees within their own country. Two scarred Holocaust survivors, a Jewish-Palestinian couple, and a Palestinian laborer and his wife who lost their home in the upheavals of 1948 tell their stories. As is often his strategy, Gitai here takes a particular place and examines it in detail, in order to precisely examine the complex relations that comprise social life. The valley is both a specific place and a symbol of a possibility of coexistence for the larger Israeli society. Ten years later Gitai returned to Wadi Rushmia to see whether social relations had changed. The resulting film, Wadi, Ten Years Later, is constructed from his earlier, celebrated Wadi and his return trip.