Ajami, the new Israeli film on tense relations between Palestinians and Jews in Jaffa, won the Israeli equivalent of the Oscar -- the Ophir Prize -- for best film at a Haifa ceremony on Saturday night.
Gershom Gorenberg wrote here last week about skipping the news coverage of the Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas meeting to watch the film:
Despite Barack Obama's efforts, his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas would not be the denouement of successful diplomacy. Emotionally as well as physically, the get-together in New York on Tuesday would be half a world away from the unsolved conflict. Following updates on news sites would be an exercise in escapism, I concluded.
Instead, to stay real, I went to the movies. More specifically, I went to see Ajami.
The movie about Palestinians and Jews not understanding each other is the product of seven years of shared work by Scandar Copti, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. Copti grew up in Jaffa. Together they wrote, directed and edited the film. Funding came from the government-backed Israel Film Fund, as well as foreign investors. Rather than use professional actors, Copti and Shani recruited residents of the neighborhood and actual police officers and put them through a year of acting workshops before starting to shoot. The dialogue was improvised, taken from the actors' lives. According to one account of the filming, only three of the dozen or so participants in the clan-arbitration scene knew that it was fictional.
Ajami's Jewish and Palestinian creators, Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti, also won the prizes for best director, best screenplay, and best editing. The film -- in which most of the dialogue is in Arabic -- now becomes Israel's candidate for best foreign film in next year's Academy Awards.
--The Editors
