It is no surprise that religious faith — the personal joy or torment it can entail; the social conflict or cohesion it can engender — is a key preoccupation of many Israeli films. Three films from the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange's Israeli Film Festival share these preoccupations, albeit within vastly different contexts and to varying degrees.
Walls (Kirot) is firstly concerned with social issues, especially concerning the violent mistreatment of women by brutish men. Galia (Olga Kurylenko, pictured) is a Ukranian woman enslaved as an unwilling assassin by the Tel-Aviv sex-traffic mafia. She befriends her Jewish neighbour Elinor (Ninette Tayeb), who is in an abusive marriage. Both women are beset by violence, yet each has an inner strength that they admire in, and offer to, each other.
Although a few of the film's action sequences are hokey and over the top, director Danny Lerner keeps the film moving at an engaging pace, while paying due respect to the human strengths and frailties of his two female heroes. There is a chaste sensuality to the women's friendship that contrasts with the unsettlingly rough treatment both experience from men (there is not a kind male character in this film).
In the film's most poignant sequence, Elinor takes Galia to be ritually cleansed. Before the cleansing begins, Galia breaks down, explaining to Elinor that she is afraid for God to look at her and see the terrible things she has done or been forced to do. This cuts to the core of the shame and brokenness experienced by the truly repentant. Galia is cleansed, and is liberated.
The writer-directors of Ajami, Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, have taken a page out of Alejandro González Iñárritu's (Babel) playbook to make a film with a disjointed time sequence and shifting perspectives, thereby offering a complex, humane portrait of a community riven by cultural conflict and social ills.
The players here include Omar (Shahir Kabaha), the next likely victim in a chain of retributive shootings; 16-year-old Malek (Ibrahim Frege), who is desperate to make a quick fortune to pay for his mother's much-needed surgery; Binj (Scandar Copti), who has been forced by his brother to hold drugs for him; and police officer Dando (Eran Naim), who is searching for his missing brother, whom he believes to have been murdered.
Copti and Shani are a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli respectively. Their portrayal of events in the multi-ethnic Tel-Aviv locale of Ajami