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Yoram Kaniuk -  Walla 

Ran Tal’s film, “Children of the Sun”, is not only a brilliant movie and executed so beautifully, but also a movie that deals with the history of the beauty of shattered dreams.  The Kibbutz was a great dream.  It wanted to change the world, man’s soul, his way of life.  It took children and raised them from cradle to the grave, much in the way you raise sons of gods without a god creating them.  The founders of the Kibbutzim wanted youth who were a combination of the Russian "Mojik" Strongman and Bedouins.  They sought after youth with golden hair and eyes of blue, the same as was desired in Germany.  And like the Germans, they desired youth of the outdoors, of the land, of dedication and good behavior, who denounce life’s pleasures – and youth, as is stated in the HaShomer oath – who has no impure sexual thoughts.  Youth who respect and live outside the bourgeoisie framework of the family.

In collecting an amazing collection of remote archival pieces, the movie shows how the Israeli youth in Kibbutzim were similar to the dream of German mothers.  And afterwards, the shattered dreams of those who sent their children to the Komsomol.  The movie presents a tangible model of this dream which inGermany created monsters, which in Russia gave birth to cruelty of a collective run by butchers, and which here produced a generation that could establish a country.  That could connect an absence of selfishness as a tough – and perhaps impossible – commandment together with a sanctified cause.  A sort of religion without a god who was left in the Diaspora.  This is how they established the State, its renewing culture, its literature that flourished in the Laborers Library and whose newspapers expressed the voice of the culture in the Landof Israel…

“Children of the Sun” is in my opinion a small masterpiece.  This is the first time I have seen this story from beginning to end, in either film or book form.  It is hard not to understand that it was a great dream.  As opposed to the Nazis and the Russians, this dream did not lead to disaster.  Nor to killing.  The only revolution in the history of mankind that was not followed by violent conflict which it caused, which did not sprout rivers of blood like the French and Russian revolutions.  The movie depicts a failure, but a failure of a great inner journey.  A failure which is an achievement of mankind, in order to state that if you want to fix man, it will be hard – perhaps impossible: But worthwhile.  And indeed, most of what is to be found in the Land of Israel since 1977 was created on those grassy lawns, in the marches with torches, in the shame and courage of the Children of the Sun, innocently and through brainwashing, and the fact that one can believe that something will not end in disaster, but rather in the saddened, yet daring sobriety, of this filmmaker.