Promises

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * )

There's a moment of sheer magic, funny enough to make you cry, in this Oscar-nominated documentary which is now a contender for the September 10 Emmy awards.

It's a film about kids caught up in the endless Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and at one point Shlomo - a New York-born ultra-orthodox Jew, highly articulate, profoundly devoted - is solemnly holding forth. A barefoot Arab urchin sneaks into shot and, in a good-natured piece of mischief-making, tries to put Shlomo off his stride by belching loudly.

Shlomo smiles indulgently but when the gesture is repeated he replies in kind. Before you know it, the two lads - separated by history, religion, social class - are vying to outburp each other and giggling like old mates.

If there was hope to be found in a film shot in Israel and the Occupied Territories in the three years of calm following the Oslo Accords, more recent developments might seem to have dashed them.

Certainly this film, produced for America's PBS network, is full of grim portents: Jerusalem-based Mahmoud, whose father owns a grocery store, spouts the easy rhetoric of Hamas, while Moishe, a frighteningly beautiful boy from an extreme right-wing Jewish settlement, tells the film-makers that he hates all Arabs.

By contrast, Sanabel, from the Deheishe refugee camp, whose journalist father has been held in an Israeli jail for two years without being charged, nurses behind her tears a hope that future generations will stop talking past each other.

It is she who helps set up the film's most substantial communication, between secular Israeli twins and a sports-mad Palestinian boy.

Promises, though made by two Jews, is remarkably even-handed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has been excoriated by radical anti-Zionist groups for failing to provide the historical context of the conflict. But it never seeks to. It seeks to record voices seldom heard and it is by any standards a remarkable document.

Directors: B.Z. Goldberg, Justine Shapiro

Running time: 106m

Rating: G

Screening: Academy