Anou Banou or the Daughters of Utopia

In this documentary, six Israeli women, now in their seventies, recall their roles in the founding of a nation that was to be a refuge for a battered people and a light to the world. Socialism, feminism, agricultural self-reliance were to be combined in the desert of Palestine; shibboleths were abandoned by a new generation of Jews that would think everything out anew. Now the young women of those days sit bemused in homes and gardens, more splendid than any they had ever imagined for themselves, and try to understand how their ideals seeped away. Intelligent use is made of archive footage, conversation and interviews to produce a witty, and affecting, memorial to yet another promised land.