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Peter Kosminsky Collection (The Government Inspector / the Promise / Britz) [Region 2]

Jonathan Cake (Actor, Host), Emma Fielding (Actor, Host), Peter Kosminsky (Director, Host) Rated:

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Format: DVD

4.1 44 ratings

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Playback Region 2 : This will not play on most DVD players sold in the U.S., U.S. Territories, Canada, and Bermuda. See other DVD options under “Other Formats & Versions”. Learn more about DVD region specifications here

Product Description

United Kingdom released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital Stereo ), English ( Subtitles ), WIDESCREEN (1.78:1), SPECIAL FEATURES: Box Set, Cast/Crew Interview(s), Commentary, Interactive Menu, Multi-DVD Set, Scene Access, SYNOPSIS: The Government Inspector (2005) Mark Rylance, the award-winning stage and screen actor and artistic director of the Globe Theatre, takes the role of Dr Kelly, the Government Inspector. From the producers of Holy Cross and Channel 4's The Hamburg Cell, The Government Inspector is based on extensive original research and was written and directed by Bafta-winning Peter Kosminsky. The Promise (2010) Just as 18-year-old Londoner Erin (Foy) sets off to spend summer in Israel with her best friend, Eliza (Weeks), she unearths an old diary belonging to her seriously ill grandfather, Len (Cooke). Intrigued by the life of this old man she barely knows, she takes the diary with her, and is stunned to learn of his part in the post-WWII British peace-keeping force in what was then Palestine. Britz (2007) From BAFTA-winning writer & director, Peter Kosminsky, comes a gritty and unflinching contemporary thriller about a young brother and sister, both British-born and Muslim, both pulled in radically different directions by their conflicting personal experiences in post 9/11 Britain. SCREENED/AWARDED AT: BAFTA Awards, ...Peter Kosminsky Collection - 5-DVD Box Set ( The Government Inspector / The Promise / Britz ) ( Homeland )

Product details

MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ Unrated (Not Rated)
Package Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 5 x 2 inches; 12 ounces
Director ‏ : ‎ Peter Kosminsky
Media Format ‏ : ‎ Import, Widescreen, PAL
Run time ‏ : ‎ 678 minutes
Actors ‏ : ‎ Jonathan Cake, Emma Fielding, Julian Wadham, Katharina Schüttler, Mark Rylance
Subtitles: ‏ : ‎ English
Producers ‏ : ‎ Peter Kosminsky Collection - 5-DVD Box Set ( The Government Inspector / The Promise / Britz ) ( Home, Peter Kosminsky Collection - 5-DVD Box Set, The Government Inspector / The Promise / Britz, Homeland
Language ‏ : ‎ English (Dolby Digital 2.0)
Studio ‏ : ‎ StudioCanal
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005K272EU
Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 5

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4.1 44 ratings

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ms consumer

A great buy for hours of riveting entertainment!

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2017

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Excellent in every way. Great stories (based on true events), wonderfully acted by greats like Mark Rylance.

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Leola

Beautiful in it's truth

Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2015

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Kominsky takes on brutal issues with a clear and unsentimental vision. Beautiful in it's truth, excruciating in its reality.

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Amazon Customer

EXCELLANT

Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2015

The Promise has never been shown in the United States because the examination of another view of historical development of present day crises which differs from the state propaganda pro- Israel line cannot be tolerated. This mini-series of course has its own interpretation of historical events through fictional characters but exposes trues historical events: the Holocaust and the inevitable changes wrought upon the world by World War Two; British Colonialism and its brutalities and willingness to offer the "lads" of the land for the benefit of the leaders; loss and povert suffered by the Arabs and Palestinians inside and outside Israel even today. In essence, the folly of fanaticism.
This builds on the drama explored in Britz which is compelling and heart stopping. This is what drama should do: lead us to question our assumptions and empathize with others and perhaps count ou blessings.

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Larry Hart

A different view than Kosminsky's

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2014

“The Promise,” Peter Kosminsky’s treatment of the British experience at the end of the Palestine Mandate, a six hour miniseries, debuted in 2011 and played in England, France, Australia, with limited viewing in Israel but was never released in the United States. Currently it’s available on Hulu.com and more recently on youtube, in HD and no commercials.

Like other agenda driven dramas about Palestine/Israel it shows a distorted history of what happened when the British ended their mandate and the State of Israel was born.

“The Promise” weaves a connection in its six hours between that period of history and the present day problems which continue to plague that region. Left wing political correctness and historical inaccuracy combine to give a dishonest slant on a story that pits good against evil, the Jews being the "evil" here and the Arabs and British being the "good."

The producers had a perfect chance to tell a real story about what actually happened but instead chose to misrepresent history.

For example:

Over a series of several interviews Kosminsky and/or interviewers proclaimed:

"There are no good guys and bad guys in this sad situation and we have tried very hard to show pluses and minuses on both sides. I would be very sad if someone were to consider the series as partisan. But rather than present an impossible perfect balance, what he hoped to create in the drama was more a kind of unstable equilibrium, so that audiences would find their sympathies shifting, repeatedly, from one side to the other."

But, Kosminsky fails to do that on almost every level. He directly ties Zionist reason d’tre to the Holocaust with never a hint that the Zionist movement was almost 75 years old by the time of Hitler’s annihilation.

If we are going to tell a true story here then let’s tell it the way it really was, not the way a particular political faction would have liked it to have been.

In order to get the balance or just the “equilibrium” that is talked about above Kosminsky should have gone beyond the Palestinian driven Holocaust argument and demonstrated that the Jews have a religious liturgy which centers their history in that place.

He could have validated the Jews’ aboriginal connection to that land and showed an unbroken contiguous existence that began more than 2000 years before Mohammad was born and the Muslim claim to Jerusalem that was born with it.

But, he doesn’t and so what we end up with is a one sided view, partisan to its core, uneven in its depth and strictly Palestinian in its interpretation.

When Paul, the Jewish activist, meets with Omar, the “perhaps” reformed terrorist, in that statesman like scene in a room with other Palestinians somewhere in the territories talking about peace instead of war, Paul shakes the hand of his enemy as if to say we can live in peace.

Here’s the problem.

Why is there only the one Jew in a room filled with Palestinians who want only peace? In reality this scene should be the other way around. The room should be filled with Jews with only one or two Palestinians. That is in fact the case inside Israel or at least it was until the 1980s.

At Givat Haviva, an Israeli peace think tank in central Israel that is exactly what takes place. In a classroom 50 or 60 Jews meet with two or three Palestinians. The interaction is usually constructive for the Jews but one gets the feeling it’s only one way. There is no reciprocating dialog in the West Bank or Gaza as appeared in the teleplay. While living in Israel I attended Givat Haviva and on two occasions participated in those one way discussions. I was there and experienced it.

Again, if Kosminsky wanted to provide an “unstable equilibrium” showing both sides he should have done the scene realistically.

Kosminsky’s team claimed they interviewed eighty-two actual soldiers who served in Palestine who

"...overwhelmingly, told a similar story: they had started out ‘incredibly pro-Jewish’, but, almost to a man, they had shifted their allegiance and by the end of their stay "were feeling a great deal of sympathy for the Arabs."

He attributes their “pro-Jewish” allegiance to their experience with Nazi atrocities during the war. For any scholarly look at that history, regardless of any experience allied soldiers had with the discovery of death camps, Nazi persecution or extremist anti-Semitism, English soldiers stationed in Palestine were never anything but pro-Arab, at least from the early 1930s onward.

There are three definitive reasons for this.

1) The anti Jewish feeling among the rank and file of Britain's "Tommies" goes back to the early thirties and probably further. There were very few soldiers who actually sided with Zionist goals. So few in fact that history has considered them notable exceptions to the norm.

Probably the most famous of these was Captain Orde Wingate. Wingate's persona is one that stands out precisely because he was so unlike the vast majority of his colleagues in believing whole heartedly in the Zionist cause. His biographers, John Bierman and Colin Smith wrote that Wingate upon arrival in Palestine in 1936 “found more sympathy for the Arabs than for the Jews.”

2) The common English soldier brought with him to Palestine the understated British version of “a widespread if not particularly malignant form of social anti-Semitism common among Britons of all classes." While a far cry from Nazi hatred of Jews, British anti-Semitism, like American anti-Semitism was in full bloom in the 1930s, subtle, direct and socially and culturally confining to the Jewish community. It existed, and to say otherwise would be another distortion of actual history.

3) Englishmen had an overwhelmingly positive fascination with Arab culture. Late 19th and 20th century England was swept up into the magic of 1001 Arabian nights and other tales that were made very real by T.E. Lawrence and others that thrilled English children at bedtime—English children who grew up to be English soldiers. By the mid 1930s English support for the Arab solution to Palestine was held by the vast majority of English soldiers stationed there.

If this was true a dozen years or more before the end of WWII then how could all eighty-two veterans, interviewed have stated “so similarly” that they were so "incredibly pro Jewish?”

Either the veterans of Palestine after WWII were not entirely truthful in their interviews, maybe to hide a shameful anti-Jewish past, which is perfectly understandable in the 21st century western democratic tolerant world, or Kosminsky is trying to enhance his own left wing political agenda about what he thinks is going on in the Jewish State then and now.

Either way it’s unconscionable to portray the main character, the composite Leonard Matthews as being pro Jewish in the beginning of the story.

To show how undeserving the Jews were to be given statehood, “The Promise” centers on the more extreme liberation groups of Jewish Independence. LEHI, the terrorist group showcased in this drama is sometimes known as the “Stern Gang” or “Stern Group.”

The drama overlaps Jewish terror with Menachem Begin’s ETZEL but most of the operations taken from history dramatized in the teleplay are those attributed to LEHI, the more extreme of the two revisionist philosophies.

Engaging in assassination of British officials and terror of Arab communities, LEHI existed on the fringes of Palestinian Jewish liberation society. Kosminsky uses some of their more distasteful brutality and weaves it to show a tolerance if not a full acceptance by the entire Jewish community which is wholly untrue.

With never more than 250 members at any one particular time during its entire existence LEHI was not supported by the vast majority of Palestinian Jews the same way that Israelis today reject the more extreme philosophies of ending the conflict. Most Israelis then as now find them repugnant and not in line with standard Jewish thinking.

Through this weave of the worst Jewish terror committed during those years Kosminsky creates the “ugly Jew” of the 1940s and speeds this behavior back and forth between then and now leaving the viewer to believe Israel is that way currently, was that way then, and all of the 65 years of its existence in-between.

Therefore, watching “The Promise” gives the impression that most Israelis today favor a forced expulsion or worse, extermination of the Arabs and are conducting themselves no different than did the “Sternists” 65 years ago. We are left with nothing less than the undying support for the Palestinian solution to the problem, namely the destruction of the State of Israel.

The typical Jew in the story is never given time to explain himself. His one dimensional focus is a caricature of reality both then and now. Simply, the argument concludes the Jews are a people who have no business living in that part of the world. Furthermore, the Zionist enterprise was a huge mistake and needs to be reversed.

Most Israelis favor peace through a two state solution. History has shown that most Palestinians do not, unless Israel would acquiesce to demands that would render the Jewish State no longer Jewish. Therefore, only one solution remains, the destruction of Israel by any means necessary.

To reach that end Palestinians elected Hamas, the Muslim answer to the Stern Gang, with a mandated majority of over 60% of the vote. In other words “one Palestine from the river to the sea.” A pretty ominous note to end on but after watching the “The Promise” what other choice is there for the common person who is not involved with that part of the world and just wants everyone to live in peace.

When I first saw “The Promise” and read the blurb about it on Hulu, I was very excited. At last someone had taken the time to dramatize what happened at Israel’s birth. I mean how many times can one watch Otto Premingers’ over the top “Exodus” from 1960?

Imagine my disappointment when it became painfully clear that this was going to be just another diatribe trying to raise support for the Palestinian arguments favoring the eventual destruction of the Jewish State.

By the end of the final chapter I had to ask myself this question. Why does the media continue to distort what actually happened?

Why not tell the truth? There indeed might be truth on both sides as suggested by the producers but with treatments like Kosminsky’s, we continue to wade in the murk and fog of distortion, half-truths and one sided thinking.

If you would like to see the trailer to the mini series clink on the link

[...]

Please come to my website for more reviews, essays, Op eds, stories, and news of the Middle East at hartnation.com
follow me @hartsway

3 people found this helpful

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Bowman

I have no idea if I hate this thing or not

Reviewed in Canada on January 7, 2016

Verified Purchase

Actually, I have no idea if I hate this thing or not. Despite there being no indication on the Amazon.ca website, these disks are only useable in the UK. Further, one has to actually open the box to find this out.

A doorstop.

Michka

Parfaite réception

Reviewed in France on March 21, 2016

Verified Purchase

Merci pour cet envoi. Je recommande vigoureusement le film "Britz" qui m'a beaucoup touchée, et j'espère qu'il passera un de ces prochains jours sur Arte par exemple. Magnifique exposition des mécanismes qui conduisent aujourd'hui à l'horreur. Je verrai les autres plus tard. Peter Kosminsky est un auteur qui s'attache aux phénomènes contemporains, même avec son Thomas Cromwell, où il analyse si subtilement cette éminence grise qu'est TC.

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foobar

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Reviewed in Germany on March 18, 2013

Verified Purchase

Eigentlich wollte ich mir "The Promise" auf deutsch kaufen. Da es den Film bis jetzt aber ausschließlich auf englisch und französisch zu kaufen gibt, hab ich mich für die englische Version entschieden. Genauer gesagt habe ich die Collection gekauft, die drei separate DVD-Hüllen enthält und nicht viel teurer als die einzelne "The Promise"-DVD ist.

The Promise: 4 Episonden auf 2 DVDs, Gesamtspielzeit ca. 354min.
Der Film hilft anhand von zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen und Geschichten den Nahostkonflikt auch im zeitlichen Kontext besser zu verstehen. Als besonderes Stilmittel erzählt Kosminsky zwei Geschichten parallel. Die eine spielt zur Zeit des Aufstands der Israelis gegen die Besatzungsmacht Großbritannien. Die andere spielt in der Gegenwart, zeigt also den Konflikt zwischen dem Gazastreifen und Israel.

Britz: 2 Episoden auf 2 DVDs, Gesamtspielzeit ca. 219min.
Auch hier erzählt Kosminsky zwei Geschichten. Zuerst wird das Leben einer pakistanischen Einwandererfamilie aus der Sicht des Jurastudenten Sohail erzählt, der einen Job beim Geheimdienst MI5 annimmt. Im zweiten Teil wird die Geschichte dann aus der Perspektive der Schwester erzählt. Der Zweiteiler ist nicht ganz so gut wie The Promise, ist aber trotzdem sehenswert. Es werden die Schikanen verdeutlicht, denen Einwanderer in England teilweise ausgesetzt sind. Diese Schikanen bieten einen Nährboden für die Radikalisierung orientierungsloser oder verzweifelter Menschen.

The Government Inspector: 1 DVD, Spielzeit ca. 105min.

4 people found this helpful

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David Rowland

The Peter Kosminsky Collection

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 25, 2011

Verified Purchase

This collection of DVDs consists of three of Kosminsky's excellent films that were first shown on television - The Government Inspector, The Promise and Britz and all the films have a historical background where what took place very much resonates down to the present day.

The Govenment Inspector tells the sad and tragic story of Dr David Kelly, a Government Weapons Inspector and an expert on chemical warfare who goes to Iraq to seek out Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and after his return gave interviews to two BBC journalists that resulted in him appearing before a House of Commons Select Committee as the source of information of a broadcast given by Andrew Gilligan in which Gilligan accused the government of "sexing up" a report later known as the "dodgy dossier". Kelly feels under so much pressure when he becomes caught up in a heated dispute between the BBC and the Government that he takes his own life (unless you believe the inevitable conspiracy theories that arose soon afterwards claiming that his death was not suicide). You are left with an even greater sense of sadness when a fundamentally decent man who meant well found himself in a situation where he felt that there was no other course of action he could take but to kill himself. The futility of it all and tragic waste of human lives is compounded by the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.

The Promise tells the story of the quest by a young English girl who after reading the diary of her dying grandfather who was a soldier during the British occupation of Palestine prior to Israel becoming an independent country in 1948 goes to the middle east to find out more about him during those turbulent times. It is one of the few films that makes any serious attempt to tell the story of the middle east conflict from the Palestinian point of view as well as the Israeli point of view and in this respect it is a brave film that clearly will not be popular in certain quarters. Nobody in the Palestine of 1948 or the Israel of 2001, emerges with much credit - all those involved then and now have the blood of many innocent people on their hands. Kosminsky brilliantly recreates the conditions prevailing during the conflicts of 1948 and 2001 and he has produced an intelligent and vivid picture of a tragic situation where there seems to be no solution in sight. All the performances are excellent and he is to be congratulated on producing an exciting and memorable work.

Britz tells the story of two young British born Muslem students, Sohail, (played by Riz Ahmed) and his sister, Nazima, (played by Manjinder Virk) who live in Bradford who take radically different journeys in their lives when confronted by the issues of Islamic terrorist activities in Britain and the reaction of the authorities to these actions. Sohail is shocked by what he sees terrorists do to innocent people and through a sense of patriotism he joins MI5, whereas Nazima is shocked by the behaviour of the police in her local community, is radicalised and becomes a suicide bomber. Like his later film, The Promise, Kosminsky attempts to tell both sides of a complex situation and not as so many films do by portraying a complicated problem in a crude, simplistic way by using stereotypical characters where people are either goodies or baddies. The performances of the two main players are excellent and Kosminsky stages the story in a way that is both convincing and moving. As with The Promise there will be some people who will not like what Kosminsky has produced and would prefer not to reflect on why ordinary British-born Moslems feel so desperate that they become suicide bombers.

Kosminsky is perhaps the foremost director of films around at the moment who tells stories of important contemporary and controversial issues in an intelligent and analytical way. These three films attempt to do this and he is to be congratulated for his effort and I look forward very much to seeing his next work.

68 people found this helpful

B Jervis (New Zealand)

The Peter Kosminsky Collection

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 22, 2011

Verified Purchase

This collection of work is intelligent drama about serious contemporay events. Two of the stories are fiction and one is based on fact. In each story the main characters are British subjects and that is pivotal to understanding the context in each story that plays out - be that political, historical or religious. These films are compelling and disturbing to watch. They are not light entertainment. They are intended to make us think and reflect upon these events. There is a sense of failure pervading each story. That is not a good feeling but sadly there is no sense of hope. Truth, lies, alienation, dispossession, war, belonging, relationships, suicide are some of the reasons to be found for explaining the events that unfold in each story. The acting is great in all cases and I found the various commentaries and interviews in the extra features very helpful. There is a great deal more that could be said about this collection of work as it could be discussed on various levels and not, no doubt, without controversy or accusations of bias by some. I was deeply moved by the films and in particular on a personal level The Promise where the young British girl is able to fulfil the task her dying grandfather was unable to complete
during his military service in Palestine in 1947.

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Peter Kosminsky Collection (The Government Inspector / the Promise / Britz) [Region 2]

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