Promised Land

Venice: Biennale di Venezia / Mostra d'arte cinematografica 2004 - In competition.
One night, in the Sinai desert. Bedouins smuggle east European women through the border. The following day the women are to be auctioned locally… « Promised Land is a stunningly audacious movie, for political reasons as well as for the aesthetical 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 movie maker pretending to expose a situation, instead give way to voyeurism. Not so in this film; the eye of the director does never debase the actresses' bodies. Amos Gitai's concern for oppressed women goes a long way back in time (Bangkok Bahrain, Kadosh). Promised Land questions the notion of territoriality (the traffickers speak all kinds of languages: Arab, French, Russian, and 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, January 12th, 2005.