Stellead
Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful
Dirtylogy
It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
Scarlet
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
maurice yacowar
Kedma is not really about 1948. It uses that setting to dramatize the irresolvable conflict in Israel that if anything has increased today. It's a retrospective prophecy, explaining what's going on there now by purporting to reveal its roots.The opening scene suggests that Israel allows no personal retreat from the community's situation. An ostensibly personal moment turns out to be most public. The first shot is a woman's back as she prepares to drop her cotton slip and join her lover Yanush (Andrei Kashkar) in bed. When he shortly leaves her we see this intimacy has occurred not in private but in a crowded below-deck on the refugee ship. In the camera's slow track through the surprising crowd the personal story dissolves into the national.The film shifts from the romantic promise of that first shot into the absurdities and shock of war. The refugees -- hungry, tired, all their possessions in a bag or suitcase -- disembark into a shooting match between a hapless British military unit determined to keep Jewish refugees out of their mandate and a small, armed unit of Israelis trying to help them in.In a very reticent film, two passionate speeches carry the core: a victimized Arab's and a disillusioned Polish Jew's. Gitai gives equal consideration to the Jewish refugees and to the Arabs they displaced. For more see yacowar.blogspot.com.
ynhockey
The story of the founding of the State of Israel is one of war, suffering, refugees, political intrigues, miracles and whatnot. Taking any of the above attributes and making a movie that focuses on it cannot leave you with a bad movie. Even a completely talentless director could make an entertaining film out of the Israeli independence story. But somehow Amos Gitai managed to make even this important and exciting episode of modern history into an amateurish and boring series of scenes, which is hard to actually call a film.The movie can be summed up fairly simply: Have you read Antigone, or another similar ancient Greek tragedy? Well, imagine an ancient Greek performance of Antigone filmed with a $200 camera, without any cinematographic additions. The scenes are not linked in almost any way, the dialog seems uninspired, as if read from a piece of paper, and the 'message' of the film is told by a raving side character.The acting is terrible, the choice of cast mediocre at best, and while the film makes use of several languages, even someone who understands them will have trouble watching the movie without subtitles, because most of the actors themselves don't pronounce anything correctly.In short, a horrible movie from a horrible director. Not recommended to anyone.
dromasca
Amos Gitai is one of the best known Israeli directors, quite successful in the circuit of the international cinema festivals. What a pity that his daring and fresh approach to the key moments of the Israeli history is not doubled, unfortunately, at least in this film, by appropriate cinema means.The historical setting of 'Kedma' is the moment of the beginning of the state of Israel when immigrants from Europe, survivors of the Holocaust arrive in Israel aboard the illegal immigration boats, just to finds on the promised shore a new land of conflict. 'Kedma' is the name of an immigrants boat, as 'Exodus' was, and it deals with the same period as in Leon Uris's book and film 'Exodus', Certainly this important moment in history deserves a better treatment than the Hollywood one. It's a setting well entrenched in the collective memory of any Israeli and Palestinian. Gitai however is more interested in decomposing the historical myth rather than building or describing it.There are a few good moments in this film. Gitai likes long shots, and the first scene of the film is a beautiful rendition of the immigrants boat, with a nice passing from private to very public life. Another set of scenes represent the communication, or rather the lack of communication between the groups in the new country - immigrants from Europe still in shock after the horrors of the Holocaust, local Jews, prototypes of the 'new Israelis' full of confidence but lacking the understanding of the problems of other groups, displaced Arabs, mis-guided by their leaders and terrorized by the show of force of the Jews starting the long march that will become some day the Palestinian refugees problem, opera-style British troops, all these groups of humans get together in well filmed scenes, but do not really communicate. This is one of the problems that lay at the origin of the Israeli-Arab conflict seems the author to say.Despite some memorable scenes, the film does not come together as a consistent piece of cinema. Characters get lost, show up and die too fast, they are more an idea of what they could be than real screen characters. The problem is not the lack of message, but the means - the author focuses in two monologues (by the displaced Arab, and by the Polish Jew immigrant) that say a lot about the continuity of conflict and about heroism being no more than a form of despair in front of the vicissitudes of history, but these are theatrical or literary monologues, without a connection with the film environment where they are placed. 'Kedma' is memorable by its setting and message, but not a good film to remember.
aligant03
I watched this movie on TV because of the interesting subject - the founding of Israel in 1948 or rather the immigration and war that preceded it. The film shows a group of survivors landing ashore in Palestine and their first steps in the new country. They bring all their bad history with them but are supposed to fight for their new country at once. The director raises the controversial issues of Jewish "ethnic cleansing" against the Arab population and Jewish feelings/deeds of revenge after surviving the holocaust. Unfortunately the effort is wasted on a very theatrical, sometimes dull film which was obviously made on a low budget. Also way too intellectual in my eyes, too.
