The Plague

A film about childhood cruelty that spreads like a disease, infecting everyone who is willingly or unwillingly involved.

Summer 2003, an ordinary water polo camp. Twelve-year-old Ben arrives hoping to make friends, when a group of kids labels one of their peers — Eli — a carrier of the “plague” because of a minor skin rash. Any physical contact with him is now considered “infection,” which must be immediately “wiped away” — an apparently innocent word that becomes a metaphor for social exclusion and violence. Ben finds himself trapped between the fear of being ostracized himself and compassion for the victim, gradually getting drawn into games of pressure and submission that feel alien to him, as cruelty and the normalization of bullying begin to seem like the only way to survive.

The Plague is not just a drama about bullying among children, but a study of the mechanics of power and conformism within a small community — a story of how fear of “otherness” can turn into collective cruelty and spread as insidiously as an illness.