Promised Land

Night in the Sinai desert. A group of men and women keep warm around a campfire in the moonlight. The women come from Eastern Europe. The men, who normally walk their herds in the area, are Bedouins. Tomorrow, they will secretly cross the border. Tomorrow, Diana and the others will be beaten,

raped, and auctioned off. They will be passed from one to another, merchandized by Anne into Hanna‘s hostess club, victims of an international network that traffics in women. One night in the club, Diana meets Rose. Their encounter is a sign of hope in the women’s descent into hell.

Promised Land is a stunningly audacious movie, for political reasons as well as for the aesthetic choices made. Gitai solves the problem of representing the ordeal, the nakedness and the descent into hell of these young women, in an exemplary way. There are such films where the moviemaker is pretending to expose a situation but instead give us way to voyeurism. Not so in this film; the eye of the director never debases the actresses‘ bodies. Amos Gitai’s concern for oppressed women goes a long way back in (Bangkok-Bahrain, Kadosh). Promised Land questions the notion of territoriality (the traffickers speak all kinds of languages – Arab, French, Russian, English, Hebrew). Gitai depicts Israel as a huge capitalist brothel in the age of globalization. The representation of enslaved bodies turned into merchandise and contemptuously transported across borders and through checkpoints, appears as a metaphor of the way a scornful economic system conquers the world.

Jean-Luc Douin, Le Monde, 2005

FESTIVAL

• Venice: Biennale di Venezia/Mostra d’arte cinematografica 2004 – In competition