Israelity at the Movies
I have been watching foreign films since my teens. It didn’t much matter to me if I couldn’t speak or understand the language of a film I was watching. I suppose because I grew up surrounded by people who spoke a virtual cornucopia of languages so the sound of words I could not instinctively intuit the meanings of didn’t phase me in the slightest. What fascinated me is how other cultures internalized and expressed themselves through film. Like most North Americans, I grew up with Hollywood movies and I am not going to slag them – some were great films while others were not so great but Hollywood was familiar and I was interested in the wider world around me.
Through the years I have literally watched hundreds of foreign films. One of my personal favourites is a little Spanish gem which was originally released in the early eighties. I affectionately refer to this film as porn for ballet dancers since I first watched it with a group of my classmates. It was was roughly based on the opera Carmen but the story revolved around a flamenco dance company staging a dance version of Carmen while the personal life of the company mimicked the Opera Carmen’s story line. The five of us all fell passionately in lust for the male lead. We must have sat through the movie at least 10 times suffering from various stages of hot flashes. Of course, when we discovered the male lead was actually danced by a 60 year old man; it did make us question whether ballet had turned all us into some kind of weird sexual deviants…but hey, I have still haven’t met that many 20 year old men who had a body like his and knew how to use it.
From time to time, I would watch Israeli films but honestly, most of the ones I saw sucked. Provincial and trite with lots of weird tortured angst or horrendously bad comedy. I mostly ignored them until the last few years. The Syrian Bride seduced me into taking another look and I really started to like what I was watching. From Ushpizin to Waltz with Bashir (which I was prepared to hate not being a fan of graphic novels or soul searching agnst) but instead I was utterly engaged and so engrossed into the storyline that I nearly burnt the challah. The NY Times carries a review of the latest Israeli movie to cross the water and I so want to see Ajami.
But everything else about the film, a tribal crime drama called “Ajami,” is utterly unexpected: It is mostly in Arabic; it was co-written and directed by two novices, a Jew and an Arab; the actors were not professionals, they had no scripted dialogue, and the budget came in at under $1 million.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the movie, however, is what it does to viewers. In a conflict where each side lives and breathes its own victimhood, feeling the hurt of the other is a challenge. “Ajami” meets it. When a Palestinian youth turns to drug selling to help pay for his mother’s surgery, Jewish filmgoers here have wept. When the family of a kidnapped Israeli soldier breaks down over his murder by Palestinians, Palestinians in the theater have had tears in their eyes.
“I consider that our biggest achievement,” said Scandar Copti, the Arab member of the directing pair.
His Jewish colleague, Yaron Shani, elaborated: “People live in bubbles unaware of each other. Each side has its narrative, each side has its dreams and sees the other as threatening those dreams. But if you enter the other’s bubble, you see his dreams, his inner world and his values. Our idea was to make the audience experience what it meant to be the other.”
There are many competing narratives in “Ajami,” not just those of Jews and Arabs but also of West Bank Palestinians under occupation versus Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, Christians versus Muslims and urban Arabs versus Bedouins. The action takes place inside Ajami, a poor Arab but increasingly Jewish and gentrified part of Jaffa, the ancient port that abuts Tel Aviv to its south.
And isn’t this what creating movies all about – the ability to create something which can emotionally move us out of the safe and familiar comfort of everyday selves?
