Israel’s Oscar-Nominated Ajami: Third Time a Charm?
Earlier this month, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated the Israeli film Ajami as a contender for this year’s foreign language Oscar — putting Israel in the running for a third consecutive year.
What are the odds of that happening, particularly in light of the Toronto Film Festival boycott and similar calls for cultural boycotts of Israel?
Last year’s 1982 Lebanon war film, Waltz with Bashir, was predicted to take the Oscar for its original animation treatment. The year before, Beaufort — also centered on the 1982 Lebanon war — was a nominee.
But when I attended Israel’s version of the Oscars in September and watched as Ajami took top honors, I was certain the film would never make the Oscar grade. Too local. Too amateurish. Venice Film Festival winner Lebanon — yet another take on that war — seemed a more likely winning entry. But my knee-jerk opinion was based solely upon watching trailers, so on the heels of this month’s announcement I headed to a Tel Aviv theater to form a more educated opinion.
A day later I’m still processing the film, its implications, and the Pulp Fiction-style movie within a movie that so accurately portrays the intricacies and tenuous nature of life in this part of the world.
Here we have another in a far too long string of Israeli produced movies purporting to present an unpleasant and abusive side of Israeli society and of course it is up for some prize or another.
Happily, most Israeli films produced by amateurs whose film making ability is just about as shallow as the often silly and untrue content of their films. Most Israelis find these films to be both badly done as well as offensive and distasteful especially since they usually reflect more the anti Israel bias of their directors and producers than any reality of Israel.
@ Ken Besig
This movie shows an unpleasant and abusive side of Arabs, not of Israel. Let’s remind that Jaffa is in the very affluent city of Tel Aviv, not in the “West bank”. We see that despite living in a first world city, these Arabs prefer to deal with crimes and drugs, attack Jews, and kill each other. What I understood from the movie is that the woes of the Arabs are clearly their own and have nothing to do with “occupation” and the Israel-Arab conflict.
Since this is an anti Jewish Israel film as were its participants, my guess is that it will win and the Muslims will praise the Academy for it.
2 Brothers of Ajami Director Arrested in Jaffa
Reported: 22:33 PM – Feb/06/10
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(IsraelNN.com) Two brothers of Scandar Copti, director of the film Ajami, have been arrested for assaulting police officers in Jaffa on Saturday. One brother, Tony, was production manager for the filming and also played a small part. Ajami has been nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film.
Israel National News reported last October that one of the actors in the film, Eran Naim, was a former policeman who lost his job following his conviction for police brutality against demonstrators passively resisting the 2005 expulsion of all ethnic Jews from the Gaza region. In May 2007, Naim was convicted of violently assaulting a young demonstrator named Akiva Vitkin following the release of a video of the incident filmed by INN camera man Tuvia Lerner.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/180037