The Promised Land is less a real place and more an eternal promise. This is a quest on which three friends embark, where the destination is a Palestinian community in the middle of the United States.
Three friends drive through the mountains looking for a community of Palestinians they’ve only ever heard about. Between majestic shots of landscapes that gradually take on twilight tones and images filmed from inside the car, we piece together the identity and cultural portraits of these three friends through the stories they tell each other, which are the essence of their shared journey. Along the way, they stop — while one prays, the others talk, for example, about the appeal of analog photography, its experimental nature, unpredictability and potential for surprise or disappointment, a dialogue that will resonate at the end, when we think about the meaning of this journey for the characters. Jabal is a delicate, melancholic and very topical meditation on the experience of exile, the phenomenon of diaspora and nostalgia for the homeland. (Cláudia Marques)
