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Amid scenes of Mideast violence, a Russian Orthodox whore vows in a voiceover, "I hope that the Jews and the Arabs go on killing each other till nobody’s left." Such a sentiment makes Eitan Gorlin’s film an unlikely inquiry into the possibilities of personal redemption. Yet wherever they fall along the spectrum of evil and good, most of his characters long for deliverance — from hypocrisy, necessity, modernity, or their own flaws. The whore is beautiful Sasha (Tchelet Semel), who flees Russian poverty for work in a Jerusalem brothel; there she meets the unprepossessing Mendy (Oren Rehany), whose hormones and disaffection with his sheltered life have distracted him from his rabbinic studies. They wind up at Mike’s Place, which is owned by an erstwhile American war photographer (Saul Stein) who’s a mix of generous and destructive impulses as he seems to help Sasha while enjoying her favors. Together with his business partner, Razi (Albert Illuz), a Jerusalem Arab who’s selling land to Jewish settlers, Mike takes Sasha and Mendy on a picaresque journey to Hebron, whose sandy hills and sheep imply a benignly anachronistic Bedouin world that in fact is as compromised as Mendy’s Orthodox one. The Holy Land describes a crazy quilt of loyalties in the Mideast, where geography and economics keep opposed peoples as dependent on each other as they are on water and air. In Arabic, English, Hebrew, and Russian with English subtitles. (96 minutes) At the Kendall Square and in the suburbs.
BY SUSAN COMNINOS
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