Venue: Gala
Date: Saturday 20th March
Time: 8pm
Directors Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani / Germany, Israel 2009 / 120 min
Certificate 15 / In Arabic and Hebrew + English Subtitles
Set in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, as much tinderbox as melting pot, this hand-held debut weaves five stories of the reality of life in one of the most tense environments in the world.
Palestinians working illegally, organized gangs, drug traders, Bedouin revenge-squads, corrupt Jewish police, clandestine lovers and a Christian Arab godfather make up the characters, all played by non-actors. The film officially closed Cannes this year to huge acclaim.
Tickets £6 / £5.25, call 0191 332 4041 or Buy Online
Hannah Rose 
Anonymous 
‘“Are they human?’’’ asks Ajmal’s father, this question that resonating throughout the whole film.
The bigger political picture is sewn together with stories and anecdotes from the people of Afghanistan and the journalists. This narration brings back the human element to what they are talking about; the way in which the US has used Afghanistan as a place to facilitate their own agenda.
The audience are told early on that Ajmal will be murdered, giving the development of his presentation from friend, son, fellow journalist to Fixer, ‘person to facilitate the gathering of news stories’, heightened significance. We can then see the danger of him being hired solely as Fixer, facilitating a ‘very important name in the newspapers’.
As the film concludes we can see Ajmal being stripped of his humanity by both the Afghanistan Government and the Taliban. It is at this point, when Ajmal Naqshbandi is used as a political symbol, that he looses his life.
Although the film highlights the dangers of forgetting the human element in both individuals and counties of people, it is also very aware of Film itself creating symbolism. It suggests, then, that the place for symbols is in Film -but that real life and the very Real situation in Afghanistan does not need a symbol. What I needs is to be perceived as nothing other than human.
Ajami arrives at the Northern Lights Festival already boasting an Oscar nomination and a host of other international awards and plaudits, laden with expectation and the promise of edgy commentary. An ambitious project co-helmed by a debutant Israeli-Palestinian directorial team, and dealing with the simmering resentments and violence that hover between Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Bedouin communities in the titular district of Jaffa, it is comprised of a series of escalating confrontations between members of these groups. The film sports a crisscrossing, multi-character narrative, ostensibly to better delineate the conflicts which inhabitants of this sprawling slum find themselves embroiled in for reasons of family, religion, social standing and, in the mode of Amores Perros, class. This places the film as a kind of Israeli-Palestinian transposition of some of the major concerns of Latin American cinema over the past ten years, as well as an examination of the type of ethnic conflicts that blight modern cities, taking its cue from films like Paul Haggis’ Crash. However what arrives as a class and environment-conscious take on the urban underworld ultimately leaves rather differently, although not entirely to its credit.
Beginning with the narrator, the young brother of one the principal protagonists, sketching many of the film’s violent scenes and ruminating on the inevitability of his story’s violence, initial signs are not good. It does playfully suggest a director constructing a storyboard, hinting perhaps at the autobiographical nature of much of the film’s material. While this constitutes a vaguely interesting visual presentation of the film’s thematic arc, suggesting as it does the social forces that bring human beings into conflict when living on top of each other under the weight of history, it also doesn’t bode well for a film falling within a genre already derided as overly deterministic. We have seen social conflict as a kind of ever-repeating tragedy before, after all.
Notions of over familiarity are quickly undercut by Ajami’s acute sense of place, aided by excellent handheld camera work by Yehonatan Yacov, which gives us an intimate feeling for the labyrinthine qualities of the this urban neighbourhood and the constant possibility of violence that lingers beneath its surface. This level of attention to environmental detail is never subsumed by the larger narrative, and is one of the film’s major strengths. Whether it be the Israeli neighbourhoods where Palestinian teenagers create a makeshift living space in vacant lots, the middle class bar run by one of the film’s Christian powerplayers, or the various Palestinian restaurants and hangouts, this is an environment that feels completely organic, and ultimately lived in. The settings wordlessly delineate the divides between warring factions that go beyond the clichés of simple religious acrimony: it’s also about money and power.
The performances, reportedly developed through improvised workshops with a mostly non-professional cast, also lend proceedings an air of authenticity. The film’s directors obviously have a talent for working with actors, as well as knowledge of the parlance and modes of interaction that dominate the neighbourhood. This produces some tense and telling moments, particularly during an early scene set in a community court in which a Muslim family is condemned to an un-payable debt for having injured a local Bedouin hood in an argument over protection money. The same is true of a sequence at the film’s midway point, in which an Israeli policeman is prevented from arresting a Palestinian drug dealer by the local community, later discussing with his fellow officers the difficulty of a job in which he has sworn an oath to protect a community that resents his intrusion. These scenes, coming on like an Israeli equivalent of The Wire, speak volumes about the tribal and fiercely sectarian modes of behaviour that prevent people coming together in places like Jaffa, and the way in which a variety of local loyalties result in notions of collective responsibility outweighing that of the individual.
All of this begs the question, of course, as to why the film’s two directors felt the need to complicate their story with needlessly contrived narrative elements, chronological reshuffling and scenarios retold from multiple perspectives. This seems to serve no particular purpose beyond announcing the typically high-concept ambitions of first time filmmakers, and while the matter-of factness of many of its scenarios deserve credit for avoiding the character ‘collisions’ that made films like Crash so eye-roll inducing (exposition, thunk; exposition, clunk), it remains the case that these pretensions add little depth to the film. Character is another essential mark on which the film falls flat, with the more intense emotional relationships, such as that between Omar’s marked (Muslim) man and his illicit (Christian) girlfriend, being so hazily drawn and ridden with cliché that they become essentially meaningless. Blunt visual metaphors, such as that used in a scene where Omar’s identity is subsumed by the life of crime he is forced to adopt to pay his family’s debts, visualised through shattering his reflection in a car window, also serve to muddy proceedings.
Ajami’s numerous contrivances are ultimately a shame, because in the aforementioned moments of social conflict, as well as in a genuinely moving scene in which an Israeli family discuss the impact on their lives of sending their children to war, with all of the fear as well as pride and defiance that that entails, the film manages to create a level of emotional authenticity and intimacy that says more about the way that people in the Middle East live their lives, and the variety of forces that keep them apart, than any narrative trickery ever could. Sometimes, it really is better to let the world you know speak for itself.
It’s an excellently made film and one which would hopefully blow away people’s expectations of a film set in Israel, particularly those who would expect that the film would re-hash the usual Jews against Arabs scenario. Instead ‘Ajami’ leads us into a rough Jaffa neighbourhood (for those not familiar with Israeli geography- think … See MoreNewcastle/Gateshead for an idea of the distance separating Tel Aviv and Jaffa) unsentimentally revealing the inner conflicts within; Bedouins against Israel-born Palestinian Arabs, Christians against Muslims, Illegal workers from the Occupied Territories against the Israel-born Arabs, and yes, the Arabs against the Jews and vice versa. However the film also shows how all these communities work and live together as well.
The film is split into chapters, with each chapter shedding a little more light onto misunderstandings, multiple viewpoints, inner conflict, and family loyalty to what eventually becomes the inescapable and tragic ending.
For me it was unmissable, and a great start to the NLFF.