Tsutomu lives alone in the mountains, writing essays, cooking Zen food with the vegetables he grows and the mushrooms he picks in the hills. His routine is happily disturbed when Machiko, his editor and love interest, occasionally visits. Tsutomu seems content with his daily life. On the other hand, he still hasn’t let go of his wife’s ashes, although she died 13 years ago.

Unable to satisfy his sexual desires with his wife, Bill regularly visits prostitutes. Afterwards, he ties up and tortures them in various ways before killing them. Bill believes that if they die, they will be reincarnated and have a better life. He murders over a dozen people. One day, a young woman named Jade comes to stay with Bill’s family. He falls in love with her but is afraid that he will kill her, so he makes her leave. Jade has nowhere to go and starts working as a prostitute. When Bill finds Jade doing this, he has sex with her and gets her pregnant.

Eight years after having been raped at a beach near Santiago, a young filmmaker tells the story of the assault, the revictimizing judicial processes, and the friendship that helps her heal, in dozens of video-diary entries that comprise an artfully crafted, intimate documentary. A question remains: What is a rape, really, and when does it end?

Amos Gitai returns to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary FIELD DIARY. WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER describes the efforts of citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. Gitai’s film shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics to solve the occupation issue, these men and women rise and act in the name of their civic consciousness. This human energy is a proposal for long overdue change.