USA / Israel,
1991, 75 min
Shown in 1992
CREDITS
- dir
-
Madeleine Ali
- prod
-
Madeleine Ali, Renen Schorr, Shlomo Rogalin
- cam
-
Manu Kadosh
- editor
-
Victor Nord
- source
-
Midbar Films
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Audience Award winner. Madeleine Ali in person.
OTHER
Black to the Promised Land is the documentary story of 11 African American teenagers who, with their Jewish teacher, traveled from their homes in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn to Israel where they spent ten weeks living and working as members of a kibbutz. The teenagers are students at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Street Academy, a public alternative high school for “problem children” in one of new York’s toughest and poorest neighborhoods. The film offers a vivid and intimate portrait of the teens at home and at school in Brooklyn before their departure. In Israel we witness the fascinating and amusing unfolding of their experience as they confront a culture, a people, a language and a way of life completely alien to anything they have ever known. At first bored with the bucolic lifestyle and resentful of the kibbutz’s rigid work regimen, these troubled inner-city teens eventually come to appreciate the newfound sense of security, love and purpose they feel as kibbutzniks. Back in Brooklyn, several months after their return, the film examines the effects of this unusual experiment in alternative education, as the kids attempt to resume life in the inner city. Director Ali says: “It is important for future generations of Blacks to have our history on film, by ourselves, telling our own story.” Jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis contributed soundtrack music.
FACTOID #50
The San Francisco International Film Festival, which kicked off December 4, 1957, is the longest continuously running film festival in the Americas.
