A new Australian film presents a confronting - and some say controversial - take on the highly political and violent Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
'Last Dance' is a fictitious account of an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor and the young would-be Palestinian bomber who takes her hostage.
Australian-Lebanese actor Firass Dirani stars as the male protagonist. Despite previously saying he would like to see more positive roles for actors of diverse backgrounds, he said this was a role he could not pass up.
“I thought OK, they're throwing this at me, why not do the best possible fundamentalist fanatical there is,” says Dirani.
Watch the extended interview with Firass Dirani:
The role also required him to empathise with the would-be bomber.
“You know, you question what you are capable of really, as a person” he says. “Throughout the story you realise that he has lost his family... he's desperate for revenge and he is being manipulated as well by a certain group of people.”
As the story develops, the captor and the hostage realise that they are both from a region that binds and separates them, and they become friends.
“I think the story is about the value of a single human life,” says actress Julia Blake. “I think she's in some ways a liberal minded Jewish person.”
“And then something happens and in fact in this film she moves on to a new place.”
The film brings the international Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a local setting and challenges Australian audiences to consider both sides from a personal, rather than political, point of view.
The characters find a connection through their common experience of loss - she from Nazi Germany, he from Palestine. And that doesn't sit well with some.
Daniel Meyerowitz-Katz, policy analyst at the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, says filmmakers should be cautious of how they approach this topic.
“The Holocaust is not the same as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Nazis and the way that they treated the Jewish people... is not at all morally equivalent to the Israeli army firing back against Palestinian militants who are trying to kill them,” says Meyerowitz-Katz.
“You have to be very wary approaching it, it has to be done sensitively. Divorcing it from politics is not the right idea,” he says. “You can't really make a drama about a terrorist kidnapping and holding hostage an old Jewish woman in Australia and make that apolitical; it kind of has politics all over every part of it.”
However, the film's message of mutual understanding may inspire some.
“I don't think it will change the hearts and minds of anybody who takes a firm position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” says Professor Kevin Dunn from the University of Western Sydney. “But for the rest of us, I think it might mean that we can have a slightly more rounded understanding of the protagonists involved in those debates and why they come to have the very firm and fixed views that they have.”
Dunn is however concerned about the stereotyping of Muslims.
“The way in which we aren't given a sense of how much of a minority this person would be, how unlikely this event would be,” he says. “Most Muslims in this country are ordinary day to day Australians who have ordinary day to day concerns.”
Shot entirely in Melbourne, Last Dance opens across Australia this week.
