Origin: Poland | France | Documentary | Director: Susan Sontag | 137 minutes

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Promised Lands

Susan Sontag 1974 docu 137 min.

Susan Sontag's only documentary, Promised Lands was filmed in the aftermath
of the October 1973 war and initially banned by Israeli censors wary of
"damaging the country's morale"'. Recently rereleased after being
inexplicably forgotten, this immediately unique essay film marks a critical
moment in Zionist society, but also in Sontag's own thinking on images and
power. Against a back of post-war anomie and anti-Arab sentiment, her film
traces fault lines in a militarised society, combining observational
meditations (landscapes, military patrols, cinemas, cemeteries, psychiatric
wards, national museums) with profound interviews (with author Yoram Kaniuk
and physicist Yuval Ne'eman). A prominent public intellectual at the time
of its making, Sontag was already penning her celebrated essays On
Photography, stressing that medium's acquisitive violences and
desensitizing effects. That she chose to turn her own lens onto images of
faraway wars and the spectacle of human suffering at the same moment raises
fascinating questions, making Promised Lands not just an exceptional
document of a critical juncture in Middle East history, but also compelling
viewing for anyone engaging with Sontag's work.

Full feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NnHLJkcxrE

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View trailer