Writer/director Danni Reisfeld wrote that while there are plenty of movies about how the non-European Jews in Israel suffer discrimination, nobody points out that where they're a majority, these folks are just as closed and arrogant a community as anybody else. So he's provided a Romeo and Juliet story in which the male outsider pursuing a forbidden love is one of Israel's many Russian immigrants whose Jewish ancestry has been rendered nominal by generations of assimilation. We're supposed to sympathize with this fellow, ill-treated as he is by the prevailing community of Tiberias (with ancestry largely from Morocco and thereabouts). The problem with the movie is that what makes him a character worth sympathizing with is not any virtues that he draws from his Russian background but the fact that he is unlike all his Russian friends. They're a violent lot. They shake down storekeepers and daub swastikas on synagogues. So when somebody says, "Why don't you just go back to Russia?" the audience may well think, "Why not indeed?"
The movie holds a mirror-- could it be deliberately?-- up to 2012's GOD'S NEIGHBORS. The latter movie began with a gang of atheistic Russian immigrants provocatively violating the Sabbath and scuffling with observant Jewish youths, including the protagonist, who is a musician and proceeds to fall in love with a woman who turns him away from violence. Those scuffling atheistic Russians are the community our hero belongs to in WHITE PANTHER, and he too falls in love with a woman who turns him away from violence. In both movies, when the hero needs to connect with his deepest values, he takes off all his clothes and walks into the sea. But while the man in GOD'S NEIGHBORS has values rooted in religion (and indeed in Judaism water is a symbol of the Torah, the Jewish system of values), the man in WHITE PANTHER can think only of his father, a champion boxer from Moscow who met with hard luck in Israel. His father was a good guy, his mother is a good woman, but the rest of the Russians in the movie all seem to be the dregs of society. Nobody carries the tradition of great Russian literature or music (although the hero's brother is a rapper), and everyone is on the wrong side of the law. It can't be the portrait that Reisfeld intended to paint, but it's a distortion by omission.
The most familiar actor in the movie is Zeev Revah. His recent performances seem effortless; all he needs to do is let the camera play over his jowly porridge of wrinkles and he's credible. The other actors are also believable; more so than the script, which is often predictable without always making perfect sense.
A lot can be forgiven because the intended message is a good one: minorities deserve respect, even from other minorities.
