Whether you’re a critic of Israelis or Arabs, the film Ajami has something for everyone. Amid its dark twists and turns, one thing that Israel’s 2010 Oscar nominee doesn’t do is put the blame for the conflicts in the Holy Land on any one group. Everyone is equally wrong. And right. This particular achievement could have something to do with how the film itself was created.
Written, directed, and edited by Palestinian Scandar Copti and Israeli Yaron Shani in their big screen debut, the movie is visceral and alive, yet ultimately confusing—and even bewildering.
Copti and Shani used non-professional actors and filmed on location (much of the film is shot around Jaffa’s multi-ethnic Ajami neighborhood), which lends an air of authenticity. Both Arab and Hebrew are spoken, blending the worlds of these two peoples living in the same land. In this way, Ajami is intriguing.
But the nature of the story is violent—it opens with the murder of a young Arab killed for revenge, and the body count of dead and crippled continues to grow. It almost feels like a nod to gangster movies, only with much of depicted death brought on through clumsy mistakes by confused young men who dominate the story’s landscape.
One boy is trying to figure out how to get money for his dying mother’s operation. Another needs a huge sum to settle a dispute with Bedouin gang lords. And yet another gets taken down by his younger brother’s act of violent stupidity. There are a few hints of feminine influence here and there, but the female characters take a backseat to the copious amounts of testosterone.
Underlying Ajami’s ambitious interwoven stories of Jews, Muslims, and Christians who are neighbors, friends, lovers, and enemies, are sparks of the ongoing enmity between these groups that exists in Israel. It’s depicted as frustration, anger, hate—but with an edge of resignation on both sides. In the U.S., it’s what popular culture has dubbed “frenemies.” These are people who are a cross between friends and enemies because they associate with each other more out of necessity than choice.
Ajami uses time as a character in the storyline, as it weaves in and out of interconnected lives by going backwards and forwards. The reasons for many things are revealed in the story’s telling, but the reasons for many others are not.
The landscape of the movie, which is another non-human character throughout the film, is also intriguing. It includes everything from the sound of early-morning birds and dawn light to the intensely hot backdrop of the landscape in the West Bank, and the grittiness of the streets. If you are not in Israel when you’re in the theater, Ajami almost makes you feel like you are.
The film succeeds at drawing you in to invest in the fate of the main characters. Unfortunately, the film fails to highlight any hopeful aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian predicament. The tensions depicted in nearly every scene between Jews and Arabs portrays a bleak hopelessness. After all, if an Israeli and a Palestinian can come together to make such a successful film, how come they can’t portray such grains of positivity in their story?
