Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

maurice yacowar Kedma is not really about 1948. It uses that setting to dramatize the irresolvable conflict in Israel that if anything has increased today. It's a retrospective prophecy, explaining what's going on there now by purporting to reveal its roots.The opening scene suggests that Israel allows no personal retreat from the community's situation. An ostensibly personal moment turns out to be most public. The first shot is a woman's back as she prepares to drop her cotton slip and join her lover Yanush (Andrei Kashkar) in bed. When he shortly leaves her we see this intimacy has occurred not in private but in a crowded below-deck on the refugee ship. In the camera's slow track through the surprising crowd the personal story dissolves into the national.The film shifts from the romantic promise of that first shot into the absurdities and shock of war. The refugees -- hungry, tired, all their possessions in a bag or suitcase -- disembark into a shooting match between a hapless British military unit determined to keep Jewish refugees out of their mandate and a small, armed unit of Israelis trying to help them in.In a very reticent film, two passionate speeches carry the core: a victimized Arab's and a disillusioned Polish Jew's. Gitai gives equal consideration to the Jewish refugees and to the Arabs they displaced. For more see yacowar.blogspot.com.

ynhockey The story of the founding of the State of Israel is one of war, suffering, refugees, political intrigues, miracles and whatnot. Taking any of the above attributes and making a movie that focuses on it cannot leave you with a bad movie. Even a completely talentless director could make an entertaining film out of the Israeli independence story. But somehow Amos Gitai managed to make even this important and exciting episode of modern history into an amateurish and boring series of scenes, which is hard to actually call a film.The movie can be summed up fairly simply: Have you read Antigone, or another similar ancient Greek tragedy? Well, imagine an ancient Greek performance of Antigone filmed with a $200 camera, without any cinematographic additions. The scenes are not linked in almost any way, the dialog seems uninspired, as if read from a piece of paper, and the 'message' of the film is told by a raving side character.The acting is terrible, the choice of cast mediocre at best, and while the film makes use of several languages, even someone who understands them will have trouble watching the movie without subtitles, because most of the actors themselves don't pronounce anything correctly.In short, a horrible movie from a horrible director. Not recommended to anyone.

luckystrike6 I'm not sure I got what I was supposed to get out of this film. As a piece of cinema it was an interesting way to shoot a low budget movie. With long, almost entirely wide-angle shots that hardly move at all, (except for a magnificent opening sequence and some hand-held work later on) it's staged and paced like a series of short plays. Some of the settings are just too simplistic; visually there isn't a lot going on besides the stories of the people coming in and out of the frame. There's no main protagonist in the film; numerous characters come and go, unresolved, sharing nearly equal screen time, but never quite enough of it to make any one of them more than a two-dimensional expression of a social theme. This dispassionate attitude gives "Kedma" a very documentary feel for the first two acts. It is the third act which is confusing, and even as a Jew with family in Israel, I feel severely underqualified to interpret Amos Gitai's true intentions with it. Watched with one set of eyes, it could be called a relatively simplistic portrayal of the birth of a nation, which throws its hands up to a certain extent and spreads the blame for the current situation around widely enough to defuse the certain blowback this film was to receive from the Orthodox community. On the other hand, in blaming Christianity, the Talmud and the Messianic tradition for enforcing the diaspora mentality over the past 2000 years, it stops right on the doorstep of declaring the modern State of Israel a product of the Jews' inheritance of the Nazi mentality which drove them there in the first place. Now: This isn't what I'm saying, but it might well be what the film is saying. At the very least it states boldly that the heroic Sabra stance is nothing more than the bitter side of the slave mentality, an ongoing form of self- flagellation. Only, the movie doesn't give you any inkling that this is where it's taking you as it leads you on in documentary form; and the result is definitely shocking. This is not a movie which apologizes for any outburst of emotion; nor does it pay much homage to the myth of the historical Maccabee. In short, it is about the weak preying on the weaker. Whether or not its stance is correct or covers the entire picture, again, I'm not qualified to say. There are certainly several other sides to the conversation than the one this film snakes its way into advancing. It's not a coincidence, either, that "Kedma" is the name of the refugee ship the Jewish characters arrive on; this movie, if nothing else, is the anti-"Exodus." None of the above, by the way, makes this film particularly enjoyable to watch. But if you like watching painful and well-crafted work that makes you think, well...it's still not that enjoyable to watch, but at moments it's completely riveting.

Claudio Carvalho A group of Jewish immigrants arrive in Palestine, after a travel in the vessel Kedma, to live in a kibbutz. While resting on the beach after the disembarking, British troops shoot them, and some of them escape with the support of a Jewish platoon. Sooner they are ambushed by Arabian resistance, who are trying to protect their lands against the Jewish invasion. Yesterday I saw 'Kedma' on DVD and I confess that I was completely disappointed with this low-budget and personal movie. The back cover of the DVD and the Plot Outline of IMDb provide important information about the 'when' the story takes place, which I have not seen in the movie. The story happens in May 1948, shortly before the creation of the State of Israel. There is also a boring speech of one of the survivors about the fate of the Jewish people. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): 'Kedma'