Ajami (2009)

From all the movies we submitted to the Academy Awards during the years, Ajami stands victorious. A great story about small hopes and dreams in an average-Israeli-reality in which no one is sacred. It is story telling at it's best, and i'm not saying this strictly because i'm from Israel. it's simply a great movie. a conflict is as good as the key actors within and in this case, it shows the variety of personalities that the Israel-Palestine conflict has. I'm curious to know how the movie is accepted around the world. There are a lot of small gestures that are hidden in the language itself and can't be translated. Plus, you have to live here in order to fully understand the meaning and complexity's of the actions portrayed in the movie. I hope and pray that Ajami will be this years winner just because it deserves it more than anything else.

Fmovies: An interesting film, no doubt heavily influenced by "Traffic" and "Babel" "Ajani" takes 5 or 6 stories and quite brilliantly interweaves them together. The film mostly focuses on the Arab/Israeli conflict, and it's effect on the regular townspeople. It would help if you knew a bit of history (I didn't) to have a better political connection to the stories, but that's OK, the stories make up for it with it's human element. It's a bit confusing to follow for the first bit while you're trying to figure out what the filmmakers are doing, but once you get into it, you get hooked. Contains a twist ending that's both shocking and in an instant, puts more depth into the story. A must see if you're into these types of films. Great work here.

Ajami is a masterpiece, a film of the rare quality you look for when hitting the cinema. The achievements of this film are far greater than any shortcomings or glitches people may find.

As someone who's been to many of the exact locations (or similar) the film portrays, I was thrilled to see how well the film managed to connect these geographical dots together and create a very specific visual language.

Not often you see so many diverse landscapes and locations in one film without the diversity being annoying and decorative. In a Ajami's case, the wide selection of locations enhances the strong linkage: a small village near Nablus, the city of Tel-Aviv, a Bedouin encampment can be all linked by a single event.

By going in digging backwards into the events, it seems like only more questions arise, more events happen to be linked and the reality happens to be far different to what we expect.

This is the biggest quality of the film: It manages to open the eyes of those who thought their eyes were open already.

Ajami fmovies. Ajami is a first film by the team of Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab (with a Christian family name), and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. It gained recognition at Cannes and in Israel; and is nominated for the Best Foreign Oscar. Using locally recruited non-actors, shooting in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, which has become a mostly Arab ghetto outpost of Tel Aviv, 'Ajami' is full of improvisation and hand-held camera work that give it an intense feeling of immediacy -- and seethes with action disturbing enough to leave you feeling bruised. Israeli cinema is remarkable for a tiny country; it's a pity more Arabs outside Israel can't see this film. Despite the myriad hostilities and misunderstandings 'Ajami' depicts -- between Palestinians from the territories and Israeli Arabs; Arab Christians and Arab Muslims; Israelis and Arabs; rich and poor; old and young -- there is hope in the fact that an Arab and a Jew could team up for such passionate film-making.

'Ajami' interweaves multiple story-lines with a documentary feel using a large cast and, to make matters more complicated but also underline interconnections, it's divided into chapters that are not quite in chronological order so some events are seen again, from a different angle the second time. Most of the scenes are in Arabic but some are in Hebrew or a mixture of Hebrew and Arabic. All the location inter-titles and the end credits are rigorously both Hebrew and Arabic -- a practice not uncommon in Israeli cinema, but especially resonant here.

The action begins with a drive-by shooting -- of the wrong person. A young boy, Nasri (Fouad Habash), who narrates the film, his soft voice giving it a kind of clarity and delicacy, is present when his cousin is shot while working on a car in the street. The hit man meant to get Nasri's brother Omar (Shahir Kabaha), as revenge for Nasri's uncle's killing of an extortionist. Omar is now clearly in mortal danger.

The neighborhood leader and restaurant owner Abu Elias (Youssef Sahwani) arranges a deal-brokering among village elders at a bedouin camp where men bid back and forth as to how much protection or payoff money is required for Omar to stay alive. Omar can't possibly raise the sum finally arrived upon, but he's indentured at Abu Elias' restaurant; and there, Omar turns out to be in love with his boss' daughter Hadir (Ranin Karim), a serious no-no, since her family is Christian and Omar's is Muslim. Next there arrives a bright-eyed and innocent teenager, Malek (Ibrahim Frege) who sneaks in from the occupied territories and is an illegal worker in the restaurant, an Arab exploited by an Arab, the harsh Abu Elias. Malek also has an impossible financial burden, needing to raise many thousands to pay for a bone marrow transplant for his seriously ill mother.

Eventually both Omar and Malek are drawn into trying to deal dope to raise money, against the strong objections of Nasri, and totally against the wishes of Abu Elias, who wishes to appear to function within the law, even if he doesn't.

Meanwhile there are the Israeli and near-Israeli parts of the story. Dishonest Israeli cop Dando (Eran Naim) appears both as a bastard, when persecuting the boys who're clumsily attempting to sell cocaine, and a softy, when it comes to the disappearance of his younger brother from the army, perhaps captured by Palestinians, an event that devastates his family (these are the all-Hebrew scenes). The Arab co-director Copti himself plays Binj,

Old Jaffa, bordered by the Mediterranean on the east and surrounded on the other three sides by Tel Aviv, is still predominantly Arab and Ajami is one of its neighborhoods. This film, which tells its several stories episodically and without drawing any explicit lessons, conveys the hazards attending life in a place where Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, Bedouin and other criminal gangs, rub up against one another under the sometimes watchful eye of Israeli police. Without summarizing the story to the point of revealing the plot, it is about violence and the threat of violence, about familial ties and codes, about vengeance and deals to appease the avengers. It is very well acted, and the subtitles make clear what is being said either in Arabic or Hebrew and occasionally both at once. The film makers have not had much experience. That makes it all the more remarkable that they have succeeded so admirably in telling overlapping stories from different vantage points and, sometimes, out of sequence without confusing the viewer. It is harsh but powerful film and well worth the two hours required to watch it.

Ajami tells the tale of Israeli Jews and Arabs, albeit splintered. The audience is treated to a violent opening followed by dialogue and interaction. As they see the individual characters unwind, the Arab store owner, the Israeli cop, things begin to get more complicated.

The primary power of Ajami is in its mode of storytelling which correlates to the content itself. There are several chapters, each telling a different story. What is most intriguing is how these stories fit. A character will appear two chapters later only for his intentions to be revealed then. A certain act of violence, a consequence of violence, etc. are not contextualized but only taken in the moment. The viewer may be tempted to judge or hold preconceived notions about the characters until the filmmakers, often with great effect, reveal the true intentions of these individuals.

This can be applied to the whole of the Israel-Palestine situation. Each violence has its lasting impact on individuals and groups alike. In Ajami a murder is not only between the victim and the perpetrator. Likewise reading in the news about a killing can only tell a fraction of the truth. The filmmakers wisely adopted a very documentary like feel to this film, similar to The Class and Gomorra. Characters names are only mentioned realistically. There is a sense of confusion as to who is whom for some of the sequences. At times it is frustrating because a Western audience may be more tempted to discuss the actual identity of a character than understand the point of the movie as a whole. Another issue is that this documentary, video approach to film-making can sometimes feel problematic or trite. By the time the third and fourth chapters are reached, there are several emotional climaxes. But these are immediately followed by more revealing. It works in most cases, prompting me to give Ajami a very high mark.

It is a film worth seeing for anyone interested or disinterested in the region. A highly potent character study that proves, perhaps unintentionally, the power of a filmmaker to show or to not show intentions.