Description:
Susan Sontag's sole documentary project, shot in Israel in the final days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Banned by Israeli authorities upon its initial release, Promised Lands is a visceral portrait of a land torn apart by the competing values of militarism, consumerism and religious national identity.
Flooded with strikingly rendered observations of a modern Israel, Promised Lands is replete with war-torn desert landscapes, ancient synagogues and mosques, roadside military patrols, devotions at the Wailing Wall, modern shops and movie theatres and a wax museum depicting official state history. Intercut throughout the harshly beautiful imagery are conflicting commentaries by two noted Israeli thinkers: Yoram Kaniuk, who sees Israel shifting from its socialist roots to an American-style commercial culture; and physicist Yuval Ne'eman, who argues that the endemic nature of Arab anti-Semitism makes continual conflict between these historically related peoples inevitable.
"Promised Lands hardly tells all the truths there are about the conflicts in the Middle East, about the October War, about the mood of Israel right now, about war and loss and memory and survival. But what the film does tell is true. It was like that. To tell the truth (even some of it) is already a marvellous privilege, responsibility, gift." (Susan Sontag)