Ajami

Ajami opens with the sound of a pencil gently scraping a piece of paper. Nasri, a young Arab boy, is drawing a picture, his way of making sense of a life punctuated too frequently with loss. Nasri’s father is dead, his grandfather an invalid, and his older brother, Omar, is, at nineteen, already the head of the family. When the family find themselves unwillingly embroiled in a deadly feud, Omar must come up with enough money to pay off the Bedouin clan now gunning for both Omar and Nasri.

At first the film seems to be a well-made, but typical crime story set in a poor mixed neighborhood in Jaffa, but about an hour into the movie, the point of view begins to shift, more storylines emerge, time frames are shuffled, and situations that initially seemed straightforward, with unequivocal good guys and bad guys, become complex. Aside from Omar and Nasri, the characters include a charming and hedonistic friend named Binj who has a pretty Jewish Israeli girlfriend, Malek, a naïve young villager worried about his desperately ill mother, and Dando, a heavy-set, possibly corrupt and brutal Israeli cop. This is not just a movie about Arabs vs. Israelis. It’s also about Muslims vs Christians, Bedouins vs. Palestinians, and violent acts that seem senseless only when the events leading up to them are unknown.



Ajami has been short-listed for the foreign language Oscar. The work of two directors, Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew, it opens on Friday in New York City. Hopefully it will get a wider distribution, and I urge anyone who can to make the effort to see this beautifully made, perfectly plotted, and heartfelt film.