Promises

Promises offers an alternative look at the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. This documentary does not provide any political analysis, pictures of fighting or dead victims, as we are used to on television, but only of children. The three film-makers followed a group of seven local children between 1995 and 1998. They all have a totally different background. Seven children tell their own story about growing up in Jerusalem. All stories are equally dramatic, emotional and told without any self-censorship.B.Z. Goldberg, one of the directors who speaks Hebrew and Arabic, persuaded two Jewish twins to spend a day with Arab children. After a fairly stiff acquaintanceship, the children play soccer together, eat and talk – with the director as mediator and interpreter.Promises, a human portrait of a generation, shows how deep rooted and almost insoluble the problems of the Middle East have become. While the children only live 20 minutes away from each other, they live in completely different worlds and know hardly anything about each other. Their picture of the world is formed by the adults around them and the circumstances in which they live. As a result, the older they get, the bigger the physical, historical and emotional gap between them grows. When the protagonists speak out in an epilogue a couple of years later, it becomes apparent that all have lost their childlike innocence.