The Shifting Sands

Jacques Madvo's documentary, Israel: Land of Destiny (1977), is abstracted in The Shifting Sands, a new film by Madi Piller. Piller's film asserts the intersection of history and identification with the Land through the personal struggles of the filmmaker's father as a young Jewish refugee, arriving in 1946 in Palestine. High contrast, repeated images of the war in 1948 immediately after the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel (to be known as the State of Israel) interact with Madvo's observations of Israeli society after its first thirty years of existence. The film juxtaposes images in a fractured timeline that reflects on the acceptance of the formation of a Jewish state. The work is framed within the philosophical thinking of Martin Buber and the recent history of Israel. Shifting sands can both erase and reveal human endeavour.