Tel Aviv natives Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti collaborated on this Oscar-nominated debut feature. Shani is a Jew, but Copti (who acts, too) is a Muslim, and their interwoven stories explore the ways that Jews and Arabs interact in Israeli (and occasionally the Palestinian territories). Almost always, the dramatic thriller avoids we’re-all-the-same-under-the-skin platitudes, or the we’re-all-connected pretensions, of movies like Crash or Babel. The main characters, to the extent there are main characters, are Arab brothers trying to come up with money to avoid the (undeserved) consequences of a family feud, an illegal restaurant worker trying to pay for his mother’s operation, and a police officer trying to solve the stabbing of a fellow Jew.
I doubt that you could make a movie about Israeli Jews and Arabs and not have it reflect the deep tensions between the two peoples, but there are no suicide bombers and no military incursions here, mostly the day-to-day transactions among people who are partly separate and partly intertwined. The politics are those of everyday life in an inherently political setting. The directors play tricks with the chronology, and between that and the large slate of characters, I got confused a few times, and maybe not as emotionally involved as I would have been had they stuck with a couple of major characters. But the inside look at the cultural practices of the Palestinians was intriguing, particularly where a Bedouin elder calculates the monetary payment that can potentially end the cycle of retribution that started with a restaurant shooting.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/18/2010
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