In light of the present tragedies and horrendous war on the people of Gaza, it is almost impossible to dream. Let alone believe that it is possible to enter the lives of Palestinian shepherds and Jewish Settlers with a camera in such an intimate way. There is a before and an after October 7, 2023. But I would like to stop and pause on The Before. During the making of this important film, the Palestinian shepherds grazing these mountains were still allowed to live in their ancestral lands in the hills of South Hebron. Two years after the completion of this film many of the Palestinian people who live in this area have been brutally expelled. The Jewish settler Avidan photographed in Avidan's story is no longer there either. His existential understanding of Judaism has too crumbled into itself. After the massacres of October 7 and the unmeasured and senseless brutal war unleashed on Gaza we can begin to understand how horror leads to horror. “Those to whom evil has been done do evil in return”, famously coined by W. H. Auden on the eve of the second world war. How can it be that we have learned nothing? How are we still inflicting so much pain on one another? Avner Faingulerent in his beautiful documentary, edited and produced in Montreal, crafts a delicate reality of human beings and their internal conflicts in these bloody lands. It is in times like these that films can show us that people, although different, share a common humanity if only in the eye of the observer. In The Desert is a quiet deeply dignified look at two realities living side by side. They are not one story, they are two. This is a statement on its own. Possibly one that can not be reconciled in reality. There is no pretending to do so in the film either. Omar's Dream and Avidan's Dream are two films that portray daily realities of shepherds in South Mount Hebron. One is about a Palestinian family; the other is about Jewish family. Both live close to each other in an area of the West Bank that is governed by the Palestinian Authority, but controlled by the Israeli Army. Omar Halil Muhammed brings his two wives Gozlan and Miriam from their comfortable house in Yata to live in a tent in the desert and herd his sheep like his ancestors. Avidan Ophir builds a farm near the place where he was born, Susiya, and wants to have his flock spread all over the hills like in Biblical times. Life in the desert is merciless, the politics are brutal, but both of them find that the main drama is inside themselves and their families.

Danae Elon
Filmmaker

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