COLLIDING DREAMS, a film by award-winning filmmakers Joseph Dorman (Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness and Arguing the World) and Oren Rudavsky (A Life Apart: Hasidism in America and Hiding and Seeking) will open at Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York on February 19 and at Laemmle Royal and Town Center 5 in Los Angeles and at Regal Westpark in Irvine, CA on March 4th. A national release will follow.
COLLIDING DREAMS recounts the dramatic history of one of the most controversial, and urgently relevant political ideologies of the modern era. The century-old conflict in the Middle East continues to play a central role in world politics. And yet, amidst this fierce, often-lethal controversy, the Zionist dream of Jews for a homeland of their own remains little understood and its meanings often distorted. The documentary addresses that void with a gripping exploration of Zionism’s meaning, history and future. Told through the remarkable lives and voices of Jews and Palestinians living in the Middle East today, COLLIDING DREAMS weaves together past and present, ideas and passions, wars and peace talks, brilliant minds with the voices of ordinary citizens to develop a film portrait of unprecedented depth and sensitivity.
Few ideas in the modern era have had as momentous an impact on the world as Zionism. Born in the late 19th century, this seemingly utopian dream was meant to solve the age-old problem of anti-Semitism and to allow a place for Jewish life and culture to thrive in the modern world. Few could have envisioned its remarkable and rapid success: the creation in less than a century of a thriving democratic Jewish state. And yet despite its success, the very legitimacy of the Zionist Idea – and the State of Israel – are questioned more today than ever before. The debate over Israel — triggered by the latest war, or terrorist attack, or national election – is often guided by emotion rather than substance, by fear or anger rather than a thorough understanding of Zionism and its history.
Incorporating interviews with writers, politicians, activists, the young and the old, Israeli and Palestinian, together with rarely seen footage culled from archives all over the world, the film focuses on several critical moments in the history of Zionism: its origins in Europe; the early relations between Jews and Palestinians in turn of the century Palestine; the 1948 war known alternately as the War of Independence and the Nakba; the euphoria of the Jewish People and the devastation felt by Palestinians after Six Day War of 1967; the messianic West Bank Settlement Movement and the idealism of the Peace Movement; and the colliding forces among Jews, and between Jews and Palestinians today.
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