The film focuses on Gaza and the West Bank where soldiers and youths are caught up in the Intefada, and on the clash of history and ideas in regions to which both peoples have historical claims.
The film intersperses in-the-street footage with interviews with academics, journalists, soldiers, artists, family members of prisoners, and victims of violence.
With emphasis on the lives of the refugees and settlers, and following a "Golani" platoon of Israeli soldiers led by Lt. Kobi Motiv, the film dramatizes the irreconcilable positions of many on both sides In 1988, David Green, an Orthodox Jew, spoke to Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli-born son of Holocaust survivors, about creating a film about the First Intifada.
[3] Jacobovici made connections with executives at the Cineplex Odeon Corporation while making Falasha: Exile of the Black Jews.
He sent the treatment to executives Jeff Sackman and Robert Topol and both reacted positively, but waited for Garth Drabinsky's reaction before making a commitment.
[4] The producers filed for funding from Telefilm Canada and Bill House, the head of its Ontario office, praised the treatment as "well written" and "so articulate about the issue".
The producers started raising funds for second unit filming in December 1989, and received an additional $30,000 from Cineplex.
[17] Stephen Holden, writing in The New York Times, praised the film as "an elegantly interwoven sequence of words and images".