Amid the daily developments, all of which revolve around indiscernible deadly volleys of rhetoric and weaponry, it has become too easy to lose track of the Middle East conflict's human toll. Promises, a video documentary by veteran journalist B.Z. Goldberg and co-directors Justine Shapiro and Carlos Bolado, attempts to change that by presenting the conflict through the eyes of seven children. "I knew the children here had something to say," Goldberg says in voiceover early in the film. That statement may sound slightly maudlin, but the film that follows is anything but. Instead of finding naïfs, Goldberg interviewed children with fully formed, if not encouraging, opinions on the conflict around them. The children range from Shlomo, an ultra-orthodox rabbi's son whose polite speech barely masks an already hard-set prejudice, to Sanabel, a Palestinian refugee-camp resident whose journalist father has been imprisoned for years without trial for expressing his opposition to Israel. Goldberg's subjects have such concrete, developed views of the world that, for the most part, he could be talking to adults. Often, their experience has reinforced their views. At one point, a young Palestinian named Faraj excuses the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah with the simple statement, "They kill women and children, but they do it for their country." But the fact that Faraj saw a friend die from an Israeli bullet at the age of 5 makes that view somewhat less shocking. A model of evenhandedness, Goldberg lets each child have his or her say. But there's no hiding the agenda in the emotional segment that brings together Faraj and two Israeli twins for an outing in which the talk ranges from soccer to the bullet holes of Faraj's neighborhood. It's one of the few moments in Promises that doesn't make the old cliché about children being our future seem like a formula for greater disaster.