“The Time That Remains”: One Arab family in Israel

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 02:01:00 +0000

An armored vehicle full of Israeli soldiers rolls up outside a trendy nightclub in the West Bank. "Citizens of Ramallah!" squawks the loudspeaker. "Curfew! Curfew!" The well-dressed young people in the club, a floor-to-ceiling glass block that seems wildly implausible in this setting, take absolutely no notice. The soldiers repeat their warning a second time and then a third. Since you're watching a movie by a Palestinian filmmaker, you might think you know where this is going -- a raid, a bombing, atrocity and death in one or both directions -- but you don't. After a few repetitions, the scratchy imprecation transforms from one thing to another, from a hostile invasion into a layer or sample on top of the techno-house beat pounding from the DJ's booth. The soldiers realize this too, and we glimpse them through the dim grated window, bopping their heads to the music and waiting for their cue.

“Ajami”: Israel’s gritty answer to “Crash”

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:20:00 +0000

I'm afraid it sounds like damning with faint praise to compare the Israeli Oscar-nominated film "Ajami" to Paul Haggis' "Crash," but, honestly, it's just a frame of reference. (Fernando Meirelles' "City of God" will do almost as well.) "Ajami" is almost entirely free of the coruscating sentimentality and absurd coincidence that defined Haggis' Oscar sweeper, and its intimate vision of lives lived on both sides of the Arab-Jewish dividing line is sympathetic but overwhelmingly tragic. Set mainly in the eponymous neighborhood of Jaffa, the largely Arab town just south of Tel Aviv, "Ajami" uses its episodic structure, overlapping chronologies and large ensemble cast to depict interlocking communities that live in close physical proximity yet remain alien to each other and trapped in a cycle of pointless, bitter violence.

Salon.com > Ajami

“The Time That Remains”: One Arab family in Israel

“Ajami”: Israel’s gritty answer to “Crash”