Esther, Amos Gitai's first fictional film, and the first in his Diaspora Trilogy, is a retelling of the biblical story of Purim in which King Ahasuerus selects the beautiful Esther as his queen, unaware that she is Jewish. Informed of a plot to kill the Jews, she is able to save her people. Gitai was interested in the story of Esther both as the only diaspora story in the Bible and as a myth of survival, of fighting back. Typically he also presents a repressed part of that familiar tale, the bloody revenge killings by Jews of their enemies. The tragic cycle of violence, seemingly intractable, resonates with contemporary events, a connection made visible by setting the story in the ruins of Wadi Salib-prior to 1948, an Arab neighborhood of Haifa, then Moroccan Jewish, later purposefully destroyed. The place itself seems to radiate its conflicted history. Beautifully shot by Henri Alékan, and enacted in stylized tableaux, the film has a cool approach until the final scene, when the Arab and Jewish actors talk of their own personal struggles with displacement.