Kedma

Israel

2002

100 Min

Color

1.85:1

Arabic, German, Polish, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew

Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
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PROD Amos Gitai, Marin Karmitz, Laurent Truchot, Alain Mamou-Mani

SCR Amos Gitai, Mordechai Goldhecht, Marie-José Sanselme, Haim Hazaz

CAST Andrei Kashkar, Helena Yaralova, Yussuf Abu-Warda, Moni Moshonov, Liron Levo, Juliano Mer-Khamis, Sendi Bar, Tomer Russo

MUSIC David Darling, Manfred Eicher

SOUND Alex Claude

Cannes (In Competition), Toronto (Contemporary World Cinema), Karlovy Vary (Horizons)

Synopsis

Set seven days before the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948, a small rusted ship, with a group of concentration camp survivors from Shoah, is received at the new territory with open hostility. They are met by British troops, who are shooting at them, and are trying to forbid them from disembarking. As well, the survivors are met with guns blasts being shot by the Jewish secret army, who has come to help them. Only a small group actually succeeds in landing on the small beach, where they are able to experience their first hours in Palestine. Tired and hungry, the hopeful emigrants have then to follow the Jewish forces to immediately take up arms against the Arabs. Unspoken truths from both sides explode in the violent and tragic conflict. –IMDb

Director

Amos Gitai

Born in Haifa in 1950, as the second son of architect Munio Weinraub and former Sionist activist Efratia Margalit. On the year of his birth, his parents changed the family name to “Gitai”, which is the Hebrew translation of the German name “Weinraub”. While he was a student in architecture, Amos Gitai joined the Yom Kippur war in 1973 as a reserve duty officer, and served as part of a helicopter rescue team. While serving during the war, he started filming with a 8mm camera his mother gave him as his birthday present. On his 23rd birthday, October 11th 1973, his helicopter was shot down by a Syrian missile. Among the 7 crews on board, 6 of them survived, including Gitai himself, who was inspired by this traumatic experience to quit architecture and move to filmmaking. He made a documentary on this incident and his fellow survivors, “Kippur: War Memories” in 1993, then a fictional recreation of it “Kippur” in 2000.

in 1979, Gitai directed his first feature-length documentary “House”… read more