In the classic Hollywood war film, great men lead others to seize the hill, take control, master the world. This is consistent with Americans' view of themselves as free agents, free to reinvent ourselves, free to remake the world in our image. In Gitai's film, everyone's fate is linked to everyone else's — and all are victims. Depicting war as chaos, he makes a powerful argument for peace. Gitai told Privett that he'd wanted to make this film for years but felt he could only after peace negotiations began, perhaps because he feared his sympathetic depiction of Israeli soldiers would have been taken as supporting the Israeli right; some of Gitai's earlier films were censored in Israel on the grounds that they were too pro-Arab. Here he's depicted what could be almost any war today. And by arguing that the characters' fates are intertwined and that no one is free to conquer the world, he not only links his characters to the Arabs, but all of us to one another. ---Fred Camper