Since the dawn of time, bonds of family and common ancestry have provided great solace, but have also been one of the great scourges of mankind. From real-life Hatfields and McCoys to staged dramas like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, tribal enmity ranges the world over.
The film Ajami, playing at Plimoth Cinema through March 11, explores the day-to-day conditions and psychological complexities that sustain factional troubles and provides insight on how intractable these issues are.
The two filmmakers, an Israeli Jew (Yaron Shani) and an Israeli Arab (Scandar Copti), selected Ajami, a ghetto in the Israeli city of Jaffa, as the film’s setting because of its uncomfortable mix of Jews, Christians and Muslims. This is a place where conflict, never far below the surface, frequently boils over.
As with most family or factional disputes, this film starts with an accident – a vendetta killing that takes the wrong life and sets off a back and forth chain of reprisals.
Nominated for an Academy Award, Ajami faces tough competition this Sunday from A Prophet and The White Ribbon (the latter coming to Plimoth Cinema for two weeks starting March 26). Ajami earned a Special Mention prize from Cannes and a 97 percent rating from national critics.
To examine the issues from different perspectives, Shani and Copti chose a complex, multi-narrative form with five interlocking stories. To assure realism, they selected a nonprofessional cast of local residents who turned in exceptional performances. However, with so many characters it was sometimes hard to tell one from another.
Not provided with a script, the actors spent seven months in improvisation workshops reacting to various story scenarios. The film was shot in 23 days, but without a tight script it meant shooting miles of extra film, which then took 14 months to edit. The endeavor took Shani and Copti seven years to write and fund.
Among the many characters are a Palestinian refugee working illegally to save money for his mother’s surgery, a wealthy Palestinian trying to find a future with his Jewish girlfriend, a young Israeli fighting a vendetta against his family, a Jewish police detective obsessed with finding his missing brother and many more.
Here’s Shani’s explanation for placing so many different characters in his film: “We wanted to show how different people are living in bubbles with totally subjective truths. They understand things differently, they feel different emotions and you can see it only if you see many people. To see two is not enough to identify with their dreams, their emotions, their frustrations and suffering.”
