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Jewish World Review
Nov 10, 2011
/ 13 Mar-Cheshvan, 5772
The Other Israel Film Festival; Season 5 of Both Sides of a Complex Coin
By
Richard Z. Chesnoff
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Sponsors of New York's annual "Other Israel Film Festival" say its purpose is to shed honest cinematic light on the lives of the Jewish state's "marginal minorities" --- especially its growing Israeli Arab population .
Critics of the festival (which opens its 5th season on November 10th), charge that it's all too often a radical angst machine using the guise of cinematic creativity to lambast Israel and its democracy.
In fact, both sides can occasionally be right.
This year's week-long festival, which opens on November 10 at the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan's West Side, is just such a mixed bag. It even offers festival-goers a few distinctively hyper positive notes.
For example: the festival's premier night presentation is the beautiful Dolphin Boy, an Israeli film about Morad, a brutally bullied teen aged boy from an Arab village in the North of Israel who suffers severe post-traumatic shock and is left detached from the world around him. When doctors tell his devoted father that a unique Israeli form of dolphin-assisted therapy may be his son's last treatment option, he moves with Morad to the shores of the Red Sea. There a dedicated Jewish doctor, new friends, an Israeli Jewish girlfriend, and an underwater swarm of dolphins (Arab? Jewish?), give the Israeli-Arab teenager a new lease on life.
Determined Arab-Jewish cooperation is also the subject of Israeli director Danny Verete's inspiring documentary The Human Turbine, the story of a group of Israeli Jewish volunteers, many from a kibbutz in the western Negev, who come to the aid of Susia, an isolated Palestinian Arab village in the Hebron Mountains that subsists on no electricity and little water.
Working together in an unusual but authentically warm partnership these Jews and Arabs harness wind and solar energy to bring electricity and restored well water to the caves and tents that are homes for the people of Susia . In the process, they build a solid friendship between them, belying the idea that such Jewish-Arab co-operation "can't happen here".
On the other hand, there is Israeli Arab film-maker Ibtisam Mara'ana 's 77 Steps, a well produced and finely directed documentary depicting her personal refusal to accept neither the ways of her conservative Arab town in Central Israel nor the Jewish state of which she is a natural born albeit non-Jewish citizen.
Ibtisam moves to Tel Aviv ("It has more life than any other place in Israel" she explains to me by telephone). At first she faces bigoted landlords loathe to rent apartments to Arabs. When she finds one who will, she quickly becomes a part of her new neighborhood, is asked to run for parliament by a left-leaning Israeli political party and soon falls in love with another neighborhood newcomer, a Canadian-Jewish immigrant named Jonathan.
Their budding inter-cultural romance stumbles badly, even angrily on contrasting loyalties and searches for identity: Jonathan is a devoted Zionist who believes in Israel; Ibtisam, sees herself as an angry Palestinian whose people were wronged by the very creation of the Jewish state that she declares she can never feel fully part of.
Sadly, therein lies the root of much Israeli-Arab alienation. Now 20 per cent of Israel's population, Israel Arabs, like minorities everywhere, face occasional discrimination. But they are also arguably the luckiest Arabs in the Middle East. Citizens of the region's only functioning democracy (and beneficiaries of its burgeoning economy), they enjoy the same legal rights as their Jewish compatriots. They vote, have Israeli Arab members of the Israeli parliament, Israeli Arab judges, Israeli Arab diplomats, Israeli Arab writers and film makers, Israeli Arab lawyers, teachers, scientists, industrialists and doctors - notably women as well as men.
Yet rather than celebrating their achievements as Israelis, an increasing number of Israeli Arabs like film-maker Ibtisim prefer to kvetch about their status, to mark Israeli independence day not as a holiday, but as Nakba--- Disaster Day. The sad result is a self-made alienation that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Yet how many would honestly choose to trade in their Israeli ID cards and become citizens of an independent Palestinian state?
Other fascinating festival offerings: the films David & Kamal, the erotic and surprising Lost Paradise, New Voices, and Israel's version of TV's The Office--- as well as discussions with many of the film makers.
For full details on the Other Israel Film Festival (including trailers and theaters) see: www.otherisrael.org/films
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor and veteran journalist Richard Z. Chesnoff was Senior Correspondent at US News & World Report, and is now a columnist at the NY Daily News and the Huffington Post. A two-time winner of the Overseas Press Club Award and a recipient of the National Press Club Award, he was formerly executive editor of Newsweek International. The paperback edition of his critically acclaimed book, "Pack of Thieves: How Hitler & Europe Plundered the Jews & Committed the Greatest Theft in History" is now on sale. (Click on cover above to purchase. Sales help fund JWR. To comment, please click here.
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© 2009, Richard Z. Chesnoff
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