The past resembles the future more than one drop of water resembles another.
~Ibn Khaldun
Purim falls on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Adar. It fell in late February in the year that I stayed in Jerusalem. There was a big fancy dress party, and then the day after was seemingly a fairly quiet one until my friend from down the corridor came to ask me if I'd heard the news about what had happened in Hebron.
Here I'm going to write about a film which is gentle and wistful, occasionally funny, and occasionally sad and touching. The beauty of this film lies in the fact that - despite not containing one single word of dialogue between either of the two protagonists and an Israeli character - there are more than enough references, oblique and acute, to reveal what it's like to live day to day as an Arab citizen in the Jewish State.
Imagine that the chairman of your Neighbourhood Watch is a DJ and mixtape composer with an interest in Tibetan mysticism, who smokes weed and carries a baseball bat around the hood. In characterisations of Israel which break it down into something more complex and less monolithic than 'the Zionist Entity'
How did this come about? Approximately two months after October 7th I had a few conversations with friends on both the Jewish and Arab(-sympathising) sides about films relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict...
Heatopher of late 2023 has bequeathed himself a daunting task in 2024. With no less lofty an ambition than resolving the Arab/Israeli conflict, if not for the world as a whole, but in my own head at least, I took it upon myself to watch a very strictly equal number of films from the two sides of that monstrous separation wall. These were to be watched in very rigid alternation...