AICE ISRAELI FILM FESTIVAL: The title refers to a place in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv in Israel, where Arabs and Jews live in close proximity to one another.
As portrayed in this engrossing and fine melodrama, co-directed by Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew, and Scandi Copti, an Israeli Arab, it’s a neighbourhood full of violence, suspicion, and race hatred. It’s also a breeding ground for crime and corruption. There’s a lot of blood spilled here, and it’s never pretty or exciting in a crime movie kind of way. What the movie has to say is tragic and complex; and it does so in a style that’s never less than very serious.
As shot by cinematographer Boaz Yehonatan Yacov, Ajami has the immediacy of a documentary; it’s got a feeling that the on screen action is not staged but caught in real time. The acting, too, is rich and persuasive and deeply felt, including director Copti, who is just excellent as an Arab man in love with a Jewish girl. I’ve read that the directors spent a lot of time with the non-professional cast workshopping the film’s events and it paid off; the actors don’t seem to be performing here, they’re being. Whatever they learnt in the process eliminated that sense of uncertainty often found in amateurs.
The structure is tricky and complex, shuffling time and events as it follows a big cast of characters, some connected to each other directly, some not. It’s been called an Israeli/Arab Crash, but it isn’t really. The narrative scheme, so full of misunderstandings and confusions of identity, here suggests not how people are connected; but how, insulated by race and prejudice, they are so divorced from each other’s reality.
The plot centres on a revenge/feud that starts between an Israeli Arab and a member of a Bedouin criminal clan. The action is almost impossible to summarise in brief, in any meaningful way, but the film is divided into chapters, each describing a separate strand that ultimately intersect in sometimes surprising ways. One deals with an 'accidental’ killing. Omar (Shahir Kabaha), a teenager, has to make the peace by paying a fine. This leads him into scams and the drug trade. Another plot line concerns Malek (Ibrahim Frege), an illegal immigrant, and another with an Israeli policeman, Dando (Eran Naim), and his search for his missing brother, a soldier.
For all its savagery this is a very tender portrait of family. Again and again, Copti and Shani return to scenes of day to day domesticity. Late in the film there’s a heartbreaking moment where a young boy clings to a male loved one in tight embrace; the scene is the preamble to a drug deal. It’s a long way from the celebratory machismo that so saturates movies where guns and adolescent testosterone hold sway. Blood ties and family bonds are powerful here; they drive the choices the characters make and underwrite the racial distrust at the same time.
