HBO will turn Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land into a television documentary, CEO and chairman Richard Pleper announced at the 2015 INTV media conference in Jerusalem.
“The book left me awestruck and as moved as I’ve been maybe ever,” Pleper told the crowd. “When I first approached him, I said to Ari that I’ve waited my whole adult life to find this book.”
Published in 2014, “My Promised Land” is a carefully crafted narrative history, weaving family memoir, documents and hundreds of interviews with Arabs and Jews. The book, Shavit’s first, took home the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction.
No release date has been set, but Israeli filmmaker Dan Setton, whose previous work has centered on Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has been tapped to direct.
Here, Ari Shavit addresses the City Club of Cleveland after our 2014 ceremony:
