Free Zone

Cannes: Festival de Cannes 2005 - Official selection, in competition.
Hanna Laslo, Best Actress Toronto International Film Festival 2005 - Programme "Masters".
Rebecca, an American who has been living in Jerusalem for a few months now, has just broken off her engagement. She gets into a cab driven by Hanna, an Israeli. But Hanna is on her way to Jordan, to the Free Zone, to pick up a large of sum of money. « The film is as simple as it is effective. (...) Women are both central and powerless here, victims yet perpetrators. They are conflicted as the region itself, carrying the pain and complexities of life in the Middle East within them. But they also carry a willingness to go beyond these struggles, to find some kind of common ground, and this is the space rendered in Free Zone. Gitai's camera is as marvellous as usual, a silent observer of people and landscapes, and his actors are exemplary-immediate and present - crafting characters defined pointedly against each other and the territory that delineates and traps them. »Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival 2005.