Pier Paolo Pasolini always confronted myth and history. In this film, which was originally created as a study for his feature film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, fiction and expectations are confronted with the brutal truth of Israel and Palestine. Searching for the biblical land he had dreamed of, the director is faced with a very different contemporary reality. His voyage of discovery becomes a process of selfintrospection concerned with the everyday lives of real people in sites that have shed all signs of their legendary past. Myth evolves into history and becomes assimilated to it. In this sense, the film is a riveting allegory for Pasolini’s entire oeuvre. It combines fiction and reality, as the director’s spiritual search is caught in a tangle of past and present, land and earth.