Challenging notions of war: Sexual exploitation of eastern migrants in Promised Land

Abstract

Promised Land (2004), by the Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai, represents sexual exploitation of ‘illegal’ migrants in the early 21st century as a warlike situation that is permeated with allusions to the imagery of the Holocaust. The essay argues that these aesthetic strategies derive from a conception of art not as mimesis, but as performative intervention in the public sphere. Nonetheless, the use of war tropes for the representation of the traffic implies more than an artistic effect intended to shake viewers. According to the author, it challenges conventional concepts of war and it proposes an alternative perception of the borders and identities of the Middle East.