Based on a true story.

The Wounded Healer is the story of Itamar, an Israeli war pilot of German ancestry who is shot down in his Phantom bomber above Syria during the 1973 October war. On the ground, a Syrian soldier approaches and shoots him from close range. He is pronounced dead but is eventually saved by a Syrian doctor, who removes his right lung. Itamar’s heart then drifts from the left to the right side of his chest.

Itamar spends a year as a POW, and the experience shatters the remains of his sunny and optimistic character. Upon returning home, he finds it impossible to reconnect with his old surroundings. He is emotionally detached from his family – a loving wife and three children – and is unable to return to his buddies from the air force. He develops an obsession in which he believes that the only solution for him to reconnect to his emotions is to return his misplaced heart to its proper place.

He is sent to Berlin for special surgery, accompanied by his 17 year old daughter, Orit. When he awakes with his heart supported back in place by a silicone implant, he begins to feel that his mission is to become the Israeli equivalent of Joseph Beuys, the most prominent artist of post-war Germany. 

Itamar leaves the hospital in Berlin with a vision of creating art within German society, the home of his parents. Because he feels he cannot step on German soil after the Holocaust, Itamar escapes the hospital in a wheelchair. Later, in traveling through Berlin, he covers his shoes with animal fat or is carried by others so as not to touch the ground.

A group of young Punks accepts him as their spiritual leader and makes room for him in an abandoned factory that is their home. In this lofty space, he creates the art projects that fill his head. Itamar has ideas for eccentric live actions that are in dialogue with Beuys’s work but differ in texture and feel. Alongside with his daughter, an adopted wild coyote, and his growing group of worshipers/assistants, he begins exploring the boundaries between life and art.