USA,
2001, 106 min
Shown in 2001
CREDITS
- dir
-
Justine Shapiro, B.Z. Goldberg, Carlos Bolado
- prod
-
Lucy Kaplan
- cam
-
Yoram Millo, Ilan Buchbinder
- editor
-
Carlos Bolado
- source
-
The Promises Film Project, 1442A Walnut Street, Berkeley, CA 94709. FAX: 510-525-8919. EMAIL: promises@pobox.com
- gga award
-
Golden Gate Award, Bay Area Documentary
-
COMMENTS
Justine Shapiro, B.Z. Goldberg, Carlos Bolado in person.
OTHER
From 1995 to 1998, during the brief period between the Intifada and the current turmoil in Israel, the filmmakers spent time with seven Palestinian and Israeli children, all of them intelligent and articulate and living within 20 minutes of each other. The result is a documentary that captures, without melodrama, their efforts to come to grips with the religious and national conflicts that have shaped their lives. Included are Yarko and Daniel, twins from a liberal Israeli family; Sanabel, a third generation Palestinian refugee and the daughter of an imprisoned journalist; Moishe, a right-wing settler; and Faraj who, at five, lost a friend to an Israeli bullet. All of them strive to express their own ideas of justice with an endearing honesty, but it is their personalities—the wit of the twins, Sanabel’s lively spirit—which bring this documentary to life. In one of the film’s many delightful moments, Shlomo, a serious and self-possessed Orthodox Israeli, is coaxed into a burping contest by a Palestinian boy. Eventually, several of these children, Israeli and Palestinian, are brought together, and it is in this segment that the film truly lives up to its title. Promises, however, can engender sadness as well as hope. Children are often unaware of how difficult it can be to fulfill them.
—Pamela Troy
FACTOID #88
Steve Cochran, the American actor who starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1957 SFIFF entry Il Grido, demanded a private screening of the film before it could be shown to Festival audiences so he could ensure that scenes that had been censored in Italy had not been cut from the print. Cochran, who had American distribution rights to the film, got a screening’delaying the film’s 8:30 start time for ticketholders.
