Jerusalem (1996)

Poetic and moving as Gitai's other films...
This film is not intended as a substitute for someone's absolutist Zionist history, but rather told from the perspective of an exiled Israeli Jew who is able to look back to the origins of the "troubles" in Palestine and personally, poetically and alliteratively demonstrate where things went "wrong" thru-out the whole nationalistic/zionist experiment. That there were a people there, who were terrorized, transferred, cleansed is not omitted....rather Gitai carefully INCLUDES the obliteration of a people and the scourge against them for the past 60 years and more. He views both peoples suffering with compassion while ensuring that the oppression of Palestinians is not mythologized/evaporated into yet another heroic myth of colonization. Gitai worked with Wim Wenders on "Wings of Desire" which is story of the yearning of the human heart for its beloved. KEDMA which comes a decade later in Gitai's career is more wholistic and fluid.

Confusion and ignorance
This movie was made without a script according to its producer and the lack of a script is vizable in almost every moment of this confusing film. No one connected with the script would pass a grade school exam in the Jewish history of 20th Century. One sign of the director's ignorance is that the scenes in the kibbutz in the film belong to the period of the Second Aliyah (1905-1914) when kibbutzim were a novelty in Palestine. A potential donor predicts that cooperative agriculture will certainly be a failure. But those Kibbutz scenes are placed in the 1930's when there were dozens of kibbutzim some of them populated in part by young adults born on those kibbutzim.