Cinema
Land of Promise
Juda Leman · 1935
Synopsis
Fifty-seven minutes without actors or plot, commented in English. The film opens on the land of the Bible, then on an impoverished life after the exile, and a ship brings pioneers who dance the hora. Then come the work, the stone cut for the power lines, the search for water, the fields, and the kibbutz where the song of the valley returns. Tel Aviv shows its streets, its industries and its Levant Fair; Jerusalem, its new buildings and the Hebrew University, where Haydn's The Creation is performed; finally the harvests, the orange groves and a procession of the first fruits in Haifa.
Context
A 1929 memorandum from the Keren Hayesod already set out its programme. A fiction was planned at first, the journey of a brother and a sister coming to settle in the country; delays and constraints left only the documentary footage. The song written by Nathan Alterman lost two lines to the censors. Shown in Berlin in May 1935 to an audience that the Nazi authorities limited to Jews, it was released in New York on 20 November and stayed there for five weeks. British censorship cut the scenes of Arab life in Palestine. Nazi propaganda later used some of its images in Le Juif éternel.
Who it is for
Under an hour, with commentary in English. Better to know that no actor appears in it: one watches people at work.
Prizes and reception
Special mention of the jury at Venice in 1935; praised by Variety and the New York Times, which commended its portrait while seeing a point of view in it.
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