Ajami
People from the United States didn’t realize we were correct, but we were. We allowed in people from all over (or, sometimes, made them come here). Then we stirred them together and left them to settle. We have every race, every nationality and every religion and that matters. Unhappy is the person who resides on a land with only a few.
Consider Israel, where Jews think it is very important to be Jewish and Arabs think it is very important to be Arab and Muslims think it is very important to be Muslim and Christians think it is very important to be Christian. There is a small but growing minority that thinks hey, here we all are so why don’t we get along because nobody’s going anywhere anyway? But most seem to think somebody oughta go somewhere and it ain’t gonna be them.
“Ajami,” one of this year’s Oscar nominees for best foreign film, is the latest of many anguished films set in the religious divides of Israel. It was co-written and co-directed by an Israeli Jew named Scandar Copti and a Palestinian Muslim named Yaron Shani; Jaffa represents Tel Aviv’s demimonde with high crime rates among Jews and Arabs who live side by side but apart; ironically they also work side by side but apart as well; everybody has an unofficial job that provides plausible deniability for the police not noticing he’s unemployed; everybody knows him but nobody knows what he does except his employers which includes everybody else in town.
The story takes place on mean streets Martin Scorsese might recognize. Gangsters mingle uneasily with cops and drug dealers; family feuds feed into vendettas across generations; there’s even an ancient Romeo and Juliet taboo about God having mercy on anybody who marries outside his tribe.
I have never seen a film from either Israeli or Palestinian filmmakers that makes a case for anything other than co-existence. I suppose there must be some films from that region arguing against it, but the overwhelming impression is of a vast tragic chorus lamenting social divides and the waste and loss and violence that so often claims the innocent.
Why, in such a hotbed of sectarian and partisan tensions as Israel, are there not more partisan or sectarian movies? Speaking from a position of total ignorance, I would guess that feature film directors in both societies tend to come from their respective elite classes. They see more widely; they think more deeply; they have been better educated; they respond more readily to the liberal tradition; their minds have outgrown the tribe.
Ah, but blood is thicker than water. No matter how enlightened you may be personally in your views about group identity, when two people fall in love outside their tribe, their fathers and uncles and cousins will feel threatened by this love; their fathers will say what kind of Jew marries an Arab and vice versa and so forth through every conceivable permutation of Israeli-Palestinian romance until all parties have exhausted themselves invoking ancient gods on either side. When someone kills a relative the instinct for revenge still runs deep.
“Ajami” shows us an interlocking series of such situations beginning when one man is shot dead. Then another man is mistakenly killed in revenge. Was he mistaken for the original killer? No he was mistaken for a member of the original killer’s family which he was not however he was a member of another one. Now two people are dead but no proof has been given so more revenge is necessary but nobody involved has done anything wrong according to themselves.
Calm heads try to prevail and stop the killing. The actual original killer (are you following?) is levied with a fine. To pay it, he finds he must sell drugs. That means we are now headed into gang territory. The source of the drugs is a Palestinian in love with a Jewish girl. An Israeli cop becomes involved in the case. I won’t describe more. I’m not sure I can. It’s clear enough in the film who is who, but I suspect even the characters lose track of the actual origins of their vendettas. What happens is that hatred continues to claim lives in a sort of domino effect.
The film doesn’t reduce itself to a series of Mafia style killings, in which death is a way of doing business. There are situations in which characters kill as a means of self-defense. And the filmmakers, Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, by and large show characters on all sides who essentially would like simply to be left alone to get on with their lives. Few of them possess the personal hatred necessary to fuel murder. But the sectarian divide acts as an artery to carry murder to everyone downstream. Was that a mixed metaphor, or what?
The specifics of the plot in “Ajami” aren’t as important as the impact of many sad moments that build up one after another. Hatred is like the weather. You don’t agree with rain but still you get wet. What justifies this is the honor of your family, your religion’, your tribe’. The film deplores this mentality’. So do we all when we stand back and think’.
The film has no solution. Nor is there one until people find the strength to place more value upon an individual than upon his group. Sometimes I fear we’re all genetically programmed not to do that. One solution is changing gene pools so groups are perceived differently. But I’m not holding my breath.
Watch Ajami For Free On Solarmovies.