While flipping through the out-of-print coffee table book “Living with the Bible,” Moshe Dayan’s quasi-autobiographical history of the Jews through his lens of biblical archeology, I ran across a thrilling and haunting story. In 1968, soon after Israel had access to the city of Hebron, Dayan attempted yet another highly-unofficial and spontaneous excavation. This time at the Cave of Machpelah, the Cave of the Forefathers, widely believed to be the burial site purchased by Abraham in the bible and hallowed and revered as the actual resting place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But Dayan ran into a problem – his only way into the cave was a very small opening, far too small for any of his crew to enter. His solution: find a child small enough to fit through the hole and to find them another way inside. The “excavation party” found an adventurous young Israeli girl in a nearby village, gave her a camera and a notepad, and lowered her into the unexplored, mystically charged, revered and feared darkness – alone.

Artifact, is an attempt to pay tribute to this piece of contemporary Israeli folklore by weaving and twisting it into a colorful fiction. Then, to take that fiction and through a further gesture of playful faithfulness – pretend it’s real. The film unfolds in three parts: a semi-faithful recreation of the excavation; a contemporary allegory about a young artist; and an interview with a Jewish scholar who believes in all of it.