A gritty multicultural crime drama, set in Ajami, a crumbling ancient Palestinian neighborhood of the ancient town of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, is a leading Academy Awards contender in the Best Foreign Film category.

Made over eight years with a miniscule $1-million budget, Ajami appears to be one of the few things Jews, Christians, and Muslims agree on, as it has played to great acclaim and a huge audience of 200,000 people in Israel. Richard Brody in the New Yorker has called it a humane, grass-roots, and nonpolitical approach to Israeli and Palestinian relations.

I know everyone hates politicization of the Academy Awards, but wouldn't it be great if this film wins tonight, just before Vice President Joe Biden arrives tomorrow in Israel and the West Bank to restart the stalled peace negotiations?

Ajami's plot has been compared to 2006 Academy Award for Best Picture winner Crash, with its portrayal of a fatal collision of cultures amid extreme poverty, segregation, and prejudice. However, it's also an example of art and culture triumphing over hatred: Co-directors are Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew, and Scandar Copti, a Palestinian Christian citizen of Israel, whose family lives in Jaffa.

A theme of Levantine geopolitics and interreligious relations underlies the crime drama. Omar (Shahir Kabaha) a poor Palestinian-Muslim resident of Jaffa, is trying to raise money to pay off a Bedouin organized crime boss with a vendetta against his family and plotting to run away with his Palestinian-Christian girlfriend (whose father finds them out, to tragic consequences.) An Israeli Jewish policeman, Dando (Eran Naim,) desperately searches for his soldier brother who went missing on the West Bank, assuming he was killed by Palestinians (he wasn't.) And despite the middle-clas status of Binj, a Palestinian-Christian chef who owns his own home, he's also desperate. His milieu doesn't accept his Jewish girlfriend, so they plan to abandon Jaffa for the adjacent big city of Tel Aviv. The latter character is played by co-director Copti.

Nobody in this metaphoric film gets what they want. In an emblematic scene, a sheep (a symbol of peace in the Abrahamic religions) brought into Ajami to help feed a family sets off an argument that results in death.

Nearly all of the actors are amateurs, notably a real Sunni Sheik adjudicating a tribal dispute, and hundreds of residents of the real Ajami - including several members of Copti's family. These media-savvy folks used the occasion of this weekend's Oscars to stage a protest rally yesterday, featuring Copti's mother, Mary, and his brother, Jeras - who was arrested by Israeli police last month in melee that recalls scenes from the film. Noted Haaretz:

Scandar Copti's brother, Jeras ... claimed that the arresting officers used excessive force against him, including spraying pepper gas in his eyes after he was already cuffed and bound. He said he and his brother Tony were trying to prevent police from arresting a number of children in Jaffa who were suspected of hiding drugs. According to the Copti brothers, the children had merely been burying the body of their pet dog.

Other residents of Ajami filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court on Thursday seeking to block construction of segregated housing in the neighborhood. The Association for Civil Rights In Israel, which filed the petition, said the project for right-wing-religious residents only, appears to comprise only 20 apartments, but  "the group's organizers have no plans to settle for this plot and are declaring that they intend on establishing a big neighborhood for the national religious public."

As the Los Angeles Times sees it:

Ajami residents are proud of their native filmmaker son ... and hope the film will win. But not all are happy with the neighborhood being shown exclusively as a hard-knocks crime hub. Some say the movie should have also shown the reasons for the crime: years of neglect, marginalization and insensitivity, whether deliberate or accidental.

A gritty multicultural crime drama, set in Ajami, a crumbling ancient Palestinian neighborhood of the ancient town of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, is a leading Academy Awards contender in the Best Foreign Film category.

Made over eight years with a miniscule $1-million budget, Ajami appears to be one of the few things Jews, Christians, and Muslims agree on, as it has played to great acclaim and a huge audience of 200,000 people in Israel. Richard Brody in the New Yorker has called it a humane, grass-roots, and nonpolitical approach to Israeli and Palestinian relations.

I know everyone hates politicization of the Academy Awards, but wouldn't it be great if this film wins tonight, just before Vice President Joe Biden arrives tomorrow in Israel and the West Bank to restart the stalled peace negotiations?

Ajami's plot has been compared to 2006 Academy Award for Best Picture winner Crash, with its portrayal of a fatal collision of cultures amid extreme poverty, segregation, and prejudice. However, it's also an example of art and culture triumphing over hatred: Co-directors are Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew, and Scandar Copti, a Palestinian Christian citizen of Israel, whose family lives in Jaffa.

A theme of Levantine geopolitics and interreligious relations underlies the crime drama. Omar (Shahir Kabaha) a poor Palestinian-Muslim resident of Jaffa, is trying to raise money to pay off a Bedouin organized crime boss with a vendetta against his family and plotting to run away with his Palestinian-Christian girlfriend (whose father finds them out, to tragic consequences.) An Israeli Jewish policeman, Dando (Eran Naim,) desperately searches for his soldier brother who went missing on the West Bank, assuming he was killed by Palestinians (he wasn't.) And despite the middle-clas status of Binj, a Palestinian-Christian chef who owns his own home, he's also desperate. His milieu doesn't accept his Jewish girlfriend, so they plan to abandon Jaffa for the adjacent big city of Tel Aviv. The latter character is played by co-director Copti.

Nobody in this metaphoric film gets what they want. In an emblematic scene, a sheep (a symbol of peace in the Abrahamic religions) brought into Ajami to help feed a family sets off an argument that results in death.

Nearly all of the actors are amateurs, notably a real Sunni Sheik adjudicating a tribal dispute, and hundreds of residents of the real Ajami - including several members of Copti's family. These media-savvy folks used the occasion of this weekend's Oscars to stage a protest rally yesterday, featuring Copti's mother, Mary, and his brother, Jeras - who was arrested by Israeli police last month in melee that recalls scenes from the film. Noted Haaretz:

Scandar Copti's brother, Jeras ... claimed that the arresting officers used excessive force against him, including spraying pepper gas in his eyes after he was already cuffed and bound. He said he and his brother Tony were trying to prevent police from arresting a number of children in Jaffa who were suspected of hiding drugs. According to the Copti brothers, the children had merely been burying the body of their pet dog.

Other residents of Ajami filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court on Thursday seeking to block construction of segregated housing in the neighborhood. The Association for Civil Rights In Israel, which filed the petition, said the project for right-wing-religious residents only, appears to comprise only 20 apartments, but  "the group's organizers have no plans to settle for this plot and are declaring that they intend on establishing a big neighborhood for the national religious public."

As the Los Angeles Times sees it:

Ajami residents are proud of their native filmmaker son ... and hope the film will win. But not all are happy with the neighborhood being shown exclusively as a hard-knocks crime hub. Some say the movie should have also shown the reasons for the crime: years of neglect, marginalization and insensitivity, whether deliberate or accidental.

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