#dancing arabs

New Post has been published on https://dailymoviehub.com/dancing-arabs-2014/

Dancing Arabs 2014

Dancing Arabs 2014

Dancing Arabs is a film by Eran Riklis, an Israeli filmmaker, who is somewhat known for the political echo accompanying his works. The storyline follows a young Palestinian from Tira, Eyad, whose father’s expectations of him force him to attend a Jewish school in Jerusalem. What is great about this film is that it brings so much character and culture with it. Every shot tells a thousand tales about Palestinians and their ongoing conflict with the Jewish. 

Eyad, portrayed by Tawfeek Barhom, evidently struggles with the expectations of his family and his own expectations for himself as well as the prejudice of his peers at his new school. Juggling these two worlds is rough, yet Eyad handles it stoically. When he meets Naomi, gracefully played by Daniel Kitsis, the gap between the two worlds is emphasised by the secrecy surrounding their relationship. 

Love is, once again, being portrayed as something seeping through any barrier, an all-penetrating energy demanding a more nuanced discussion than the ‘did not-did too’ quarrel their country seems to be in. By displaying such deep and complicated characters and zooming in on them specifically, the Jewish-Palistinian conflict is stripped down to its very core. To see this noble motive of explaining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to outsiders is nothing new in film culture, there is even a whole Wikipedia page about it. Yet, the effects of the conflict are just an aspect of Eyad’s development as a character and an adult. He is struggling with the everlasting question of ‘Who am I and who do I want to be?’ and finds himself forced to choose a side because of the state of his country. 

aka “A Borrowed Identity”