A man walking home at night in Tel Aviv spots his stolen bicycle locked to a pole. He calls the police, determined to reclaim what’s his. When the bicycle’s current owner — an Eritrean migrant worker — arrives, a straightforward case of theft spirals into something far more complicated, exposing fault lines of race, class, and moral certainty in Israeli society.
Editorial Perspective
Tomer Shushan’s White Eye is a film that begins as righteous anger and ends as moral devastation. Shot in what appears to be a single unbroken take (actually several seamlessly stitched), the film’s real-time urgency denies both its protagonist and its audience the comfort of distance. As the situation escalates — police arrive, documents are checked, a family’s entire existence hangs on bureaucratic decisions — the original question of bicycle ownership becomes grotesquely irrelevant. The film asks: at what cost do we insist on being right?
Where to Watch
Available on Vimeo and YouTube. Part of the 2021 Oscar-nominated shorts compilation.
Historical data reconstructed from archive.org snapshots of the Manhattan Short Film Festival website.
