A documentary as shocking as it is necessary, director Pierre Rehov’s Suicide Killers arrives on DVD from City Lights Home Entertainment on May 1, 2007.
Since the Palestinian uprising of the second intifada in 2001, internationally-acclaimed filmmaker Pierre Rehov has directed six major documentaries: The War of Images, The Trojan Horse, Holy Land: Christians In Peril, The Road To Jenin, Silent Exodus, and Hostages of Hatred. Now, with Suicide Killers, Rehov creates his most provocative, stirring, and comprehensive statement yet: a film that uncovers the psychopathological reasons behind the phenomenon of today’s suicide bombers.
Says Michael Margolies of New York Press: “If you're tired of the New York Times-NPR Slant on Israel and the Palestinians, here's good news: documentary filmmaker Pierre Rehov has been challenging prevailing myths since 2001. With seven films already to his credit and another on the way, this serious, never boring, and above all else courageous documentarian is starting to make some serious waves."
“To date, the public has only seen ‘glimpses’ of suicide bombers – on news clips, cartoons, and sadly some up front, when it was too late,” said director Rehov. “I wanted to peel back a few layers, focus my camera ‘inside,’ to places the media does not have access to.”

The Suicide Killers special DVD contains such features as interviews with survivors, Arab and US news clips, an educational study guide, a close-up look at a post-traumatic stress syndrome clinic, behind-the-scenes tour of a terrorist detention center and, inconceivable as it seems, exclusive and extreme footage of an “activated” suicide bomber on the loose! Suicide Killers will be available at a $24.95 SRP with an April 3, 2007 order due date.

Synopsis

With 9/11 marking the destruction of the World Trade Center, a new form of warfare was launched: fanatical human beings as tactical weapons. The phenomenon of “Islamic kamikazes” has spread throughout the world, with near-daily occurrences of this terrifying and deranged phenomenon – most notably in Israel.
Suicide Killers seeks to answer crucial questions: How can this phenomenon be explained? How can one after another human being strap an explosive belt around his or her body, walk into a square, market, café or store full of civilians and, in cold blood, detonate the bomb he’s carrying? In-depth inquiries are made via interviews with bombing survivors, would-be bombers held in Israeli prisons, and jailed terrorists who train others for and facilitate suicide bombings. Prominent experts in sociology, psychology, religion, the law and sexuality weigh in with their views on this distinctly modern-day phenomenon.

There is one overwhelmingly obsessive preoccupation among young men who live in a stiflingly restrictive society: SEX. From beneath grindingly strict sexual codes, these young men believe in the promise – they veritably lust after the prospect – of being presented in paradise with 72 virgins, provided they die on earth as martyrs.
Another aspect of the clash of civilizations shown in Suicide Killers is the contrast between the degree of freedom women enjoy in Israel versus the severe restrictions imposed upon women who live in countries governed by strict, clerical Islamic rule.
The psychopathology of these suicidal perpetrators of mass slaughter, regarded as “freedom fighters” and “martyrs” at home, is revealed with the painstaking edge of a cinematic thriller. The film disproves the facile and shallow view that these “martyrs”

are “victims” – people with no choice other than that of incinerating themselves and the innocents in their immediate vicinity. Rather, the film bares the truth: these people are the result of sexually repressed, male-dominated, misogynistic societies, the damaged products of clerics who interpret a religion so as to relegate women to less-than-second-class citizenship and young unmarried men to a sexual desert where the only oasis is orgiastic self-inflicted death.