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The Customer of the Off Season
The Customer of the Off Season (Hebrew: אורח בעונה מתה Ore'ach B'Onah Metah) is a 1970 Israeli drama film directed and co-written by Moshé Mizrahi. This was the first feature film directed by Mizrahi. The film, an Israeli-French co-production, was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Bear Award in 1970. It also entered into the 20th Berlin International Film Festival.[1] PlotThe film follows a German officer (Hans Christian Blech) who was a concentration camp commander near the city of Lyon. After the war, he posed as a Jewish refugee and immigrated to Israel to avoid being tried for his crimes. In Israel, he falls in love with an Israeli woman of Yemeni-Jewish descent, and they run a small hotel in Eilat together. However, the shadow of his past follows him there, and after 20 years, when a French guest (Claude Rich) arrives at the hotel, the officer fears that this Frenchman is a prisoner in his camp and might recognize and expose him. Out of fear, he murders the stranger. Critical AnalysisAccording to research in The Customer of the Off-Season (1970), Mizrahi ventures into uncharted territory, addressing themes seemingly beyond his historical purview as a Mizrahi filmmaker, as he seeks to present the Holocaust from a fresh perspective, focusing on an ex-Gestapo official who has been hiding in Eilat for two decades. This narrative was groundbreaking for its time, exploring concepts largely absent from both Israeli and global cinema of the 1960s and 70s, which typically centered on postwar life and the miraculous founding of the Jewish state. No other films of the era, including Israeli ones, delved into stories of Nazis posing as Jews or former Nazis assimilating into Israeli society.[2] Cast
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