Hot House

Hot House is a documentary about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. But director Shimon Dotan takes an unusual path to illuminate the situation. His starting point is the Israeli prisons Ber Sheba, Ashkelon, Hadarim and Megiddo. Here he has interviewed a number of Palestinean prisoners, both female and male, who have been jailed as terrorists.

Dotan portrays institutions marked by everyday life and a desire to understand each other, producing a ray of hope in an otherwise deadlocked situation – often marked by stereotyped presentations of both parties. But the film also describes how the Palestinean leadership and will to resist are allowed to develop in the prisons, an underground struggle that in the film culminates in the Hamas victory during the election of a new Palestinean National Assembly in January 2006. akek