KINO VIDEO

IGNORING THE TRADITIONAL strident portraits of aggrieved masculinity and the concomitant celebration of order's restoral through violence, the debut film by Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi takes an unusual (and much-appreciated) tack in focusing on women's role in the struggle for survival in the West Bank. Two women shoulder the burden of Palestinian memory and history, and the yearning for national self-recognition, while also making their way through the minefields of a male-dominated society.

Fertile Memory is mostly forgettable, a first effort by a filmmaker whose later work, including Wedding in Galilee, would be a far richer mosaic of contemporary Palestinian life. One scene, though, is particularly haunting and prescient: Sahar, a young mother, rides a bus through the Occupied Territories while engaging in a bitter interior monologue against "the people." Whether Israeli or Palestinian, she no longer believes in the inherent goodness of the people. "If I had a bomb," she reflects, "I'd blow up the world."

The events of recent years have proven this to be only too common a sentiment, and the intertwining of bombs and buses in the collective imagination remains, unfortunately, fertile ground among Israelis and Palestinians today.

SAUL AUSTERLITZ