The sharp, often hilarious satire that became the most successful film in Israeli history (until that time) is about new immigrants Sallah and his family, who are left in a shack near their promised apartment and are abandoned for months. A Yemenite Jewish family that was flown to Israel during "Operation Magic Carpet" - a clandestine operation that flew 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel the year after the state was formed - is forced to move to a government settlement camp. The patriarch of the family, portrayed by Chaim Topol, tries to make money and get better housing, in a country that can barely provide for its own and is in the midst absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.—Fiona Kelleghan

Peasant Sallah Shabati is a Sephardic Jew from Egpyt. He is more a schemer than a worker, using the former rather than the latter to get what he wants. He would however rather spend his days playing backgammon. For a better life, he and his family - his pregnant wife, their seven children, and his mother - decide to move to Israel into a new housing complex. Upon their arrival in Israel, they find that before they move into their house, they will be temporarily housed in a run down transit camp, that camp which has dirt roads and small huts. They soon learn that the temporary nature of their stay at the camp is less temporary than they had envisioned, as one of their fellow camp members, Mr. Goldstein, has been there for six years. He finds that wherever he goes, Sallah runs into one bureaucratic red tape process after another in his end goal of moving into a nice new house. He eventually learns that he can expedite his move into one of those houses for 1,000 lira, which he does not have and would be difficult to earn as he has no trade, and the government will only issue work they want done. He also tries to deal with those at the neighboring kibbutz, they who have volunteered to orient new immigrants at the camp to Israeli life. Sallah's mentality is contrary to that of the those at the kibbutz, not only the concept of communal ownership of everything and the good of the group as opposed to the individual, but also his traditional Sephardic ways against the kibbutz's modern Israeli ways.—Huggo

A Yemenite Jewish family that was flown to Israel during "Operation Magic Carpet" - a clandestine operation that flew 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel the year after the state was formed - is forced to move to a government settlement camp. The patriarch of the family tries to make money and get better housing, in a country that can barely provide for its own and is in the midst absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Humor, sensitivity, politics and music highlight this capsule of history.—Danny Yarhi <[email protected]>