User reviews

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.

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.

This is going to be a short review... Just finished watching it. Quiet interesting story well told with fine performances and direction.Also the script is fine and all the TWISTS actually work.

This is not actually Just Israeli or Palestinian portrayal, it portrays a lot of crime, drugs and stuff around us every where from south to north or east to west.

Current rating of Ajami is 6.9 with mere 475 votes. but I bet its going to increase.

I liked the movie, and it is fine movie worth watching.

My Rating 7.5-8.0.

I attended the The North American Premiere of "Ajami" at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. Unlike many films from Israel which traditionally present an "Israeli" or "Palestinian" point of view, "Ajami" portrays a side of life that few ever see -- Arabs living in Israel. In fact, not only is this film not primarily about Arabs and Israelis, it actually deals with conflict within the Israeli Arab world between Muslims and Christians.

Written, directed, and edited by Scandar Copti, "Ajami" is a two-hour "Crash"-like drama which looks at several violent incidents, some linked more than others, and then focuses on one in particular from different perspectives told through the use of flashbacks. The movie takes awhile to get going but once the viewer catches on to the device it becomes more compelling. The young people featured in the recurring storyline are quite endearing and easy to empathize with. This could be a coming-of-age story set anywhere in the world.

Ajami (2009) is an Israeli film nominated for Academy Award Best Foreign Language film. It's written and co-directed by an Israeli and a Palestinian--Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani.

This is a powerful film that takes place in the Ajami district, on the outskirts of Jaffa. Ajami is a mixed neighborhood, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexist in an uneasy truce. The film opens with a scene of violence, and then flashes back to an earlier scene of violence for which the opening scene violence was a retaliation.

There were five plot threads, all of them interrelated. Each scene was powerful, but I sometimes had trouble remembering how the characters knew each other, and how their history was shaping their present actions.

We saw this film at the superb Rochester Jewish Film Festival, but it will work well on DVD. In fact, I think DVD might be better, because then you can go back and review what previous scene led to the scene you're watching. It all fits together, but it was hard for me to remember just how it fits together. It's worth watching the movie and, if need be, watching it again.

'Ajami' tells a depressing and predictable story of poverty, violence and crime in Israel and the occupied territories. It's a familiar story: a chain of events spirals out of control, but at heart, a sudden demand for money (which nobody has) makes the next chapter inevitable, as it has to be obtained from someone else who also has none to spare. The story is told in a clever, 'Pulp Fiction'-style, with the same events seen from different perspectives as they feature in a variety of wider narratives. Unlike Tarantino's film, however, there's no self-knowingness here, nor is this movie in any sense a comedy. It's nicely put together, although at the start, I found it hard to like any of the characters. Male ego seems to animate many of the conflicts, which lessens one's sympathy for the protagonists (on all sides of the religious divide) who seem all equally unlikeable in spite of their misfortunes. But towards the end, a little more of the underlying tragedy begins to show itself. It's an intelligent film, and gripping to watch; but don't expect too many easy answers to the questions it poses.

Whatever we think we know about the Arab/Israel conflict on the ground, we probably don't and we are unlikely to learn much about the political side of the conflict from Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani's remarkable debut. "Ajami" might feel at times like a scripted documentary or at least a piece of neo-realism and deals, not with the wider picture but with a series of vignettes, told in chapters, of everyday life within the Ajami community where Muslims, Jews and Christians co-exist together. To complicate matters, the chapters don't run chronologically and the stories and characters seem only tenuously linked and although we frequently hear the words 'Jews' and 'Arabs' tossed about these stories could take place in the slums of Naples or in New York's Hell's Kitchen. In other words, this is closer to a gang movie than a political film though, of course, set as it is in Israel it is very much a political film.

The cast are largely non-professional and it all feels very real yet the two directors film it in such a way that we are about half way through the film before the plot begins to tie together or to make sense. This is a difficult film, perhaps a little too clever at times for its own good, but it remains a superb first feature that dares to take what we might think of as familiar material and twist it into unrecognizable shapes. Perhaps this is the kind of film Tarantino should be making.