Ajami

Not surprisingly for a Hollywood-based membership club, the Oscar academy has given nominations for Best Foreign Language Film to many of Israel's offerings. The third of three successive nods went to Ajami, a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic docudrama co-written, -directed and -edited by Scandar Copti (Palestinian) and Yaron Shani. It portrays life in Ajami, a run-down ethnically-mixed district in Jaffa.

Copti also plays one of the lead characters in a Crash-style quilt of five overlapping tales about violence and death, and religious (Muslim-Christian) and racial (Jewish-Arabic) antagonisms. No character is happy with their life; many are killed by accident or design, and no person, authority or race emerges with honour at the end of the two-hour docudrama.

The scenario holds few dramatic surprises: Ajami is an inner-city area as prone to urban warfare as that of The Wire or movies set in Belfast or Balkan lands. What is exceptional is the ensemble acting by a cast of local non-professionals, including former Israeli policemen, Muslim schoolchildren and middle-aged housewives. Coached by a professional acting teacher and the two directors, the amateurs role-play and interact in the classic styles of Method Acting and Mike Leigh movies. They had no scripted dialogue and "lived" their parts (as shown neatly in the movie's DVD extra).

Several of the family scenes, whether in Hebrew or Arabic, sound and look like cine-verite. Some set-pieces are eye-opening cultural revelations, as in the traditional Arabic parley to decide the compensation costs of a lethal inter-family feud, and the melodramatics of a grieving Jewish family.

The fly-on-the-wall documentary style of the movie is heightened by abrupt pauses for "chapter" numbers, sudden changes in plot chronology, cuts to black, and repetition of events from a different viewpoint or with extra information that deliberately overturns previous audience assumptions. The increasing tension of the movie is maintained well, however, as it becomes increasingly clear that one evil always led to another and will continue to do so.

The Israeli film industry was wise in 2009 to choose this film as its official flag-bearer. A harsh critic might accuse the movie of spending too much respectful time on the Jewish family's grief at losing a soldier son and comparatively far less on the many Arab deaths; the movie had to appeal to its primary audience. A kind critic would congratulate the movie's creative pair for depicting evil intentions and deeds committed by both races no matter what their religion is.