AllMovie

An experiment in collective cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians goes from initial success to tragic failure in this documentary. In 1990, Dugit was a small seaside settlement near the Gaza Strip in which twenty families, both Jewish and Arabic, gathered together to form a fishing village like those found in the Greek Islands. Despite initial objections about establishing a new town in Israeli territory, Dugit soon began to flourish; the Israeli and Palestinian families got along well, the fishing was good, and an idyllic sense of community grow in the new settlement. However, in 1993 the Al Aqsa intifada led to a fresh cycle of violence in the Middle East, and the conflict came to poison relations in Dugit; families began vandalizing one another's property, many fisherman were left without a livelihood, and infighting led to the collapse of the collective. Filmmakers Gil Karni and Meni Elias were on hand for the rise and fall of Dugit, and Ma'im So'arim (aka Troubled Waters) recounts this tragic story of how long-standing conflicts overcame this noble experiment. Ma'im So'arim received its North American premier at the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival.