Last night was the final local showing of Ajami, the stunning film from Israel about the rough-and-tumble Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, peopled by Palestinians, Jews, and others, all locked in an uneasy truce. The movie was written and directed by Scandar Copti, a "Palestinian citizen of the Israeli state", and Israeli Yanon Shani, who take an unflinching look at a social fabric stretched thin. Politics are the background to the tensions in Ajami but the film focuses on the daily conflicts, between ethnic groups, religions, tribes, families, and classes, which form a constant of life in the neighborhood. In Ajami life is always up for grabs; it can erupt into violence over something as trivial as the bleating of a sheep.
The movie opens with the brutal drive-by shooting of an innocent teen-ager, mistaken for the intended target. That target, a sweet 19-year-old named Omar, is the nephew of a man who shot a Bedouin thug. In time Abu-Elias, a local restaurant owner, who is the de facto neighborhood headman, intervenes. In an unforgettable scene at a tribal court, where, as in the neighborhood itself, everyone talks and few listen, he gets the family of the thug to accept a monetary payment in place of blood. But somehow all the good done by the righteous Abu-Elias, in his way one of the creepiest characters in the film, has a terrible price built into it. For Omar it is the impossibility of coming up with the money he needs in order to save his mother, half-paralyzed grandfather and prescient younger brother Nasri.
Omar's desire to do anything to save his family sets his life on a tragic spiral,but he is not alone in having his dreams destroyed. There is Malek, a 16-year-old Palestinian working illegally in Israel to earn money for his mother, dying of cancer. Dando, a brutish Israeli cop, is torn by the disappearance of his younger soldier brother, most likely the victim of an Arab kidnapping. Hadir, Abu-Elias' daughter, falls in love with Omar and naively thinks that her Christian family will permit her to marry him.
The directors Shani and Copti chose mostly to use non-professional actors, who were given freedom to improvise. Copti also plays a main role, that of Binj, a Palestinian hipster with a besotted Israeli girlfriend. The acting and the cinematography, by Boaz Yehonatan Yacov, bring these disparate tales into immediate focus without sacrificing the nuances and complexities of the lives examined. I left the cinema feeling battered but profoundly touched and grateful for a film so true.
Ajami is in Arabic and Hebrew. In a wonderful touch, opening and closing credits are given in each language, side-by-side.
