paquiwon This movie is terrible. This movie attempts to show the frustration of one Holocaust survivor having to fight again for his existence and homeland. Despite what could have been a good story line, this movie was neither a good story, nor was it a war story. First, Kedma has minimal dialog throughout the movie, and the dialog it does have it really pointless. Second, it has no action. Even the battle scene in the movie was boring. Amos Giati looks like he was just trying to stretch out the movie to make it a full-length feature rather than a short story. Third, the whole message of the movie seemed to be about the main character, Yanush's disillusionment with the Promised Land and God's promise of Messiah. He claims in the movie that the Jewish people have no history. If you read the Old Testament or Torah, the Jews have probably the longest and best-documented histories of any people. As for Messiah's coming, 2 Peter 3:9 says, "The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." If there was one scene to be salvaged from this movie, it was the Arab man, Yussuf Abu-Warda, showing his defiance of the Jews for taking his home. It is too bad there was not more to the movie than that one scene.

dino514 This movie is perhaps the slowest and most boring film I have ever seen. It is a pretentious attempt by Amos Gitai to remake Israel's national birth myth in his slow and artistic style. However, this time he fails miserably. From the opening scene that takes 10 minutes before anyone even opens their mouth the the closing speeches that are so melodramatic that they don't at all fit in with the otherwise painfully realistic piece, the movie is a disaster all the way through. In addition to its plodding style and one dimensional characters the movie is rife with factual errors. It mention fictional ghetto revolt, depicts the British army as a weak and unmotivated school marching band that speaks in American accents and seems to condense an entire year of war and struggle into one day. This movie is both a horrible depiction of Israeli history and a disastrous piece of entertainment and I would only recommend it to those who are in desperate need for a long sleep. Please do not see this embarrassment of a movie unless forced to by a man with a large gun.

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.

luckystrike6 I'm not sure I got what I was supposed to get out of this film. As a piece of cinema it was an interesting way to shoot a low budget movie. With long, almost entirely wide-angle shots that hardly move at all, (except for a magnificent opening sequence and some hand-held work later on) it's staged and paced like a series of short plays. Some of the settings are just too simplistic; visually there isn't a lot going on besides the stories of the people coming in and out of the frame. There's no main protagonist in the film; numerous characters come and go, unresolved, sharing nearly equal screen time, but never quite enough of it to make any one of them more than a two-dimensional expression of a social theme. This dispassionate attitude gives "Kedma" a very documentary feel for the first two acts. It is the third act which is confusing, and even as a Jew with family in Israel, I feel severely underqualified to interpret Amos Gitai's true intentions with it. Watched with one set of eyes, it could be called a relatively simplistic portrayal of the birth of a nation, which throws its hands up to a certain extent and spreads the blame for the current situation around widely enough to defuse the certain blowback this film was to receive from the Orthodox community. On the other hand, in blaming Christianity, the Talmud and the Messianic tradition for enforcing the diaspora mentality over the past 2000 years, it stops right on the doorstep of declaring the modern State of Israel a product of the Jews' inheritance of the Nazi mentality which drove them there in the first place. Now: This isn't what I'm saying, but it might well be what the film is saying. At the very least it states boldly that the heroic Sabra stance is nothing more than the bitter side of the slave mentality, an ongoing form of self- flagellation. Only, the movie doesn't give you any inkling that this is where it's taking you as it leads you on in documentary form; and the result is definitely shocking. This is not a movie which apologizes for any outburst of emotion; nor does it pay much homage to the myth of the historical Maccabee. In short, it is about the weak preying on the weaker. Whether or not its stance is correct or covers the entire picture, again, I'm not qualified to say. There are certainly several other sides to the conversation than the one this film snakes its way into advancing. It's not a coincidence, either, that "Kedma" is the name of the refugee ship the Jewish characters arrive on; this movie, if nothing else, is the anti-"Exodus." None of the above, by the way, makes this film particularly enjoyable to watch. But if you like watching painful and well-crafted work that makes you think, well...it's still not that enjoyable to watch, but at moments it's completely riveting.