Ten years in the making, Israeli director Ron Havilio's six-hour documentary Fragments*Jerusalem is a singularly ambitious attempt to fuse personal history with regional history, viewing the Old City's tumultuous past and present through the scope of genealogy. Havilio's roots in Jerusalem extend more than 500 years, when his paternal descendants fled there from Spain during Columbus' time; his mother's side, the Rosenthals, arrived much later as part of a sect preparing for the Messiah's prophesied return in 1840. Their various stories are neatly situated in a range of different periods over the centuries, revealing the extent to which families are shaped by forces outside their control. As its title implies, Fragments*Jerusalem is less a comprehensive history than a loose assemblage of pieces cobbled together from old photos and sketches, extensive archival discoveries, and home-movie footage. Divided into seven chapters and screened in two three-hour "cycles," Havilio's opus requires the viewer to have at least a broad understanding of the city's history (a reasonable request, considering it was made for Israeli television), not to mention a lot of time and patience. But even under the best possible circumstances, Fragments*Jerusalem is a daunting challenge, constantly lurching back and forth from the past to the present without much orientation. For all the conceptual ingenuity and admirable breadth of his project, Havilio simply isn't much of a storyteller, pasting a confusing narrative out of half-developed anecdotes and scraps of information. Still, at its core, the film presents a heartfelt and resonant portrait of a city with a tenuous permanence, continually demolished and rebuilt, fiercely divided yet remarkably resilient. Havilio opens and closes with images from his birthplace, the now-vacant Mamila district, a once-thriving commercial area outside the city walls that became a desolate no-man's land after the Six Day War. Revisiting it as an adult, the director mourns how readily a piece of history—the city's and his own—can be so easily eradicated, worrying about how this will affect the future of his three young daughters. It's in poignant moments like these that Fragments*Jerusalem lives up to its overreaching promise.