Ajami

I noticed that one reviewer said that this film was for all tastes. Well, I cannot see that at all. The film is pretty depressing and violent--and I'd never recommend it to anyone who is depressed or who doesn't want to see a film like this. It's gritty, tough and not something for all tastes. However, it was recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences (i.e, the Oscar folks) and was nominated for Best Foreign Language movie.

This film is very unusual because it is seen from several different viewpoints. I never would have imagined an Israeli film where the main characters are divided up into chapters and each one stars such different people--such as Palestinian Muslims, Palestinian Christians as well as Jews. This is the best thing about the film--it humanizes everyone and shows motivation of everyone. None of them are evil, exactly---just people for good or for bad.

As far as the story goes, here's where it gets depressing. Different folks NEED money and need it fast--such as the young man who must gather an astronomical sum to keep a violent gang from wiping out his family and another who needs to pay for his mother's life-saving surgery. What these folks do to try to get the money as well as the sad story of the dead Jewish young man all make for a compelling but incredibly depressing story. Death abounds and life is cheap in this film.

Overall, it IS well made and the acting is quite nice. But I just found myself feeling awful by the time is was finished. Maybe you'll get more out of it than me...I dunno.

I just saw this at the London Film Festival. Oh, what a treat.

Taking on the fashionable use of related threads and retelling the same narrative from a different angle, this film delivers a bullet tough view of street life and crime around Jaffa.

The audience is sucked into the maelstrom so quickly, that we forget the media view of the great enmity and realise that there are, of course, many smaller ones. While much eventually revolves around Israeli governance, this is not a blame game but a Shakespearean tragedy.

Unlike City of God, the casual viewer is not always given heavy clues about a characters background - and which side of the racial / religious divide they are on. And subtle differences can end up being of major (often fatal) importance. Beware.

This is not a film destined for multiplexes. Its a man's world where women are a distraction. There is no victory for political correctness. But more to the point, we are not given any particular reason to believe that Things Will Get Better.

Old Jaffa, bordered by the Mediterranean on the east and surrounded on the other three sides by Tel Aviv, is still predominantly Arab and Ajami is one of its neighborhoods. This film, which tells its several stories episodically and without drawing any explicit lessons, conveys the hazards attending life in a place where Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, Bedouin and other criminal gangs, rub up against one another under the sometimes watchful eye of Israeli police. Without summarizing the story to the point of revealing the plot, it is about violence and the threat of violence, about familial ties and codes, about vengeance and deals to appease the avengers. It is very well acted, and the subtitles make clear what is being said either in Arabic or Hebrew and occasionally both at once. The film makers have not had much experience. That makes it all the more remarkable that they have succeeded so admirably in telling overlapping stories from different vantage points and, sometimes, out of sequence without confusing the viewer. It is harsh but powerful film and well worth the two hours required to watch it.

An interesting film, no doubt heavily influenced by "Traffic" and "Babel" "Ajani" takes 5 or 6 stories and quite brilliantly interweaves them together. The film mostly focuses on the Arab/Israeli conflict, and it's effect on the regular townspeople. It would help if you knew a bit of history (I didn't) to have a better political connection to the stories, but that's OK, the stories make up for it with it's human element. It's a bit confusing to follow for the first bit while you're trying to figure out what the filmmakers are doing, but once you get into it, you get hooked. Contains a twist ending that's both shocking and in an instant, puts more depth into the story. A must see if you're into these types of films. Great work here.

There is the sensitive kid thrust into a situation that requires more maturity and smarts than normal for his age, there is the couple whose love incurs disapproval because it crosses ethnic lines, there is the authority figure who protects you today but may turn against you tomorrow... the problem is, this movie has two of each of those. The cast of characters is huge and hard to keep track of, the plot is artificially discontinuous, and in short if you want to get the movie straight, you'd better be ready to see it twice. Which you may want to, because the acting is convincing and although the characters are used from time to time to make a clear and didactic sociopolitical point, they win considerable sympathy from the viewer-- without, for the most part, being oversentimentalized.