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Closeup On The ‘Other’
Ibtisam Mara’na’s “Badal” deals with the effects of arranged double marriages, where a brother and sister from one family marry siblings from another. by George Robinson (Also on the schedule are “Jaffa,” the second feature film by Keren Yedaya, whose debut film, “Or (My Treasure)” was a standout, and the new series 
Ibtisam Mara’na is an Israeli Arab filmmaker who is beginning to garner much deserved praise in Europe and the U.S. Her film about the dying fishing village in which she grew up, “Paradise Lost,” was a work of considerable intelligence. So is her new film “Badal,” which is playing in the festival. But there is a significant difference between the two: In the earlier film, Mara’na didn’t mention her ties to the fishing village, although they undoubtedly motivated her choice of subject. In “Badal,” Mara’na intertwines her personal history with the compelling subject matter, adding to the film’s considerable power. A “badal” is an arranged double-marriage in which a brother and sister from one family marry siblings from another. To judge from Mara’na’s film, such an arrangement is still a frequent occurrence in more tradition-bound Arab families. She tells us at the film’s outset that she and her brother were almost dragged into such a set-up when she was 24 and considered a poor catch because she was “too old, too dark and had a scar on my hand.” But her cousins have been more successful candidates; her elderly grand-aunt has set up an entire generation of her own children and some of her grandchildren, in badal marriages. For the remainder of the film, Mara’na follows the plight of one cousin, whose widowed father has decided to remarry as the other half of a badal package. She juxtaposes the increasingly humiliating and depressing experiences of the young woman with the work of Marwat, who leads women’s awareness workshops in the town. The result is a powerful film, with the filmmaker’s own pain at seeing her cousin tormented becoming a torrential undercurrent to the proceedings. Mara’na makes no secret of her own dismay at the badal process, and one would expect that the juxtaposition of Marwat and the grand-aunt as unofficial spokeswomen for their respective points of view to be a mismatch, but the filmmaker’s deep attachment to her family and the old woman’s sheer gravitas make it a surprisingly even-handed film as well. One may come away from “Badal” loathing the marriage process and the society that approves it, but it is impossible not to have some regard for the older generation that pursues such matches. Gil Karni’s “SAZ” features a similar generational divide, albeit in a wildly different context. SAZ is the stage name of Sameh Zakout, a rising star on the hip-hop scene in the Middle East. Like most 19- and 20-year-olds, Sameh has a very clear idea of what he wants from life. (The idea may change frequently, but it’s very clear to him.) He has a particularly warm relationship with his grandfather, a delightfully cantankerous 80-year-old Communist who still delivers the Party newspaper on bicycle to a dwindling subscriber list. The warm and funny banter between the two of them is the beating heart of this workmanlike documentary, which follows SAZ on his upward trajectory in the Israeli music world. The Bedouin village of El-Sayed is probably no farther from Ramleh, where the Zakout family resides, than New York is from Philadelphia, but they might as well be set in alternate universes, as Oded Adomi Leshem’s “Voices from El Sayed” makes clear. El-Sayed is one of many “unrecognized” villages that are home to some 40,000 Israeli Bedouins, a stark collection of cinderblock houses in the middle of a Negev-set nowhere, off the Israeli electrical grid and its political radar. The rate of family intermarriage in El-Sayed is unusually high, with a resulting rate of deafness that is about 40 times that of the general population. Over several generations, a unique sign language has sprung up there of its own accord, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. The uniqueness of the language and the situation has made the village a subject of study by linguists and medical scientists, and the Israeli health-insurance system is offering to pay for cochlear implants for the deaf children of families who want them. Salim decides to have such an operation on his son. Leshem allows this story to develop at a somewhat leisurely pace, using extended shots of the village in its stark setting as a structuring device, giving the film a rather languid rhythm that reflects the undriven tempo of life there. He also manipulates the soundtrack in an effort to convey the distance between the deaf and the hearing inhabitants of the village. At first this seems a rather clichéd device but, by keeping it up throughout the film Leshem turns it into a musical trope that adds another layer to his rhythmic patterns. “Voices from El-Sayed” is rather less driven than a comparable American documentary, “The Sound and the Fury,” which also debates the pros and cons of cochlear implants. Leshem delves less into the political implications of the deaf as a linguistic minority. The gradual dying out of El-Sayed’s sign language as it is supplanted by Israeli sign, which the children are now learning in schools for the deaf, is not emphasized. As always, the price of being integrated into the mainstream of society is the loss of a unique culture. (I must admit to a small but very tangible advantage over the film’s regular audience; my wife, Margalit Fox, is the author of a recent book about El-Sayed and the study of deaf sign languages, “Talking Hands.”) Meanwhile, back in the more publicized maelstrom that is the Middle East, we have Rashid Masharawi’s charming “Laila’s Birthday,” which received a theatrical run earlier this year at the Museum of Modern Art. The film’s protagonist is an Israeli Arab lawyer and judge, now reduced to driving a taxi while he waits for the Palestinian Authority to put the legal system in order. The film follows him on a single day, but a special one, his daughter’s seventh birthday. Abu Laila (Mohammed Bakri, whose film “Zahara” is also playing in the festival) is a man of stern dignity. He has been reminded by his wife to pick up a cake and a present and be home at 8 p.m. And she doesn’t want to hear about “exterior problems, interior problems or problems because of the occupation.” There is something immensely satisfying about the picaresque tale that occurs over the course of a single day, something about the intersection of so many lives and stories in such a finite period of time. Masharawi, whose previous work includes well-received films like “Ticket to Jerusalem,” and “Waiting,” manages to stuff a lot of events and considerable wry political commentary into a mere 71 minutes — all of it held together by Abu Laila’s impeccably cared-for, if somewhat ramshackle taxicab. “Laila’s Birthday” has a satisfyingly dry wit as befits a film with such an emotionally repressed central figure. The film is splendidly even-handed in its dyspeptic vision of the West Bank as a faltering entity with all the usual problems that beset a developing country, exacerbated by Israel’s West Bank policies and compounded by an unmistakable air of neo-Stalinism from its competing political factions. And Bakri, who is almost never off-camera, gives the film a solid, implacable center. Abu Laila is an admirably immovable object, and you know that, despite all the elements conspiring against him, he won’t let his little girl down. Finally, there is the delightful short, “Oranges,” a parable-like seven-minute tale of a battle between neighbors over the products of an orange tree. The action escalates like a classic Laurel-and-Hardy food fight, but with an urbane gentility that makes it a surprisingly effective cautionary tale for the region. The third annual Other Israel Film Festival runs between Nov. 12-19 at several venues around the city, including the JCC in Manhattan (76th St. and Amsterdam Ave.) and the Cinema Village (12th Street off Fifth Ave.). For information, call (646) 505-5708 or go to www.OtherIsrael.org.
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