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.
[1] The film follows a German officer (Hans Christian Blech) who was a concentration camp commander near the city of Lyon.
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.
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.