The Mean Streets of Jaffa

Ajami, the first Arabic language film to represent Israel at the Oscars, is set in the gritty, multi-ethnic Jaffa neighborhood of the same name, where Christians, Muslims and Jews live on top of each other in accepted disharmony. Like Crash—the 2005 Oscar-winning American film about racial tensions in Los Angeles—the plot is woven from seemingly random storylines that loop back and forth in time, coalescing in one inevitable conclusion.

Written and directed by Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab who grew up in Jaffa, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew, Ajami is a true urban crime drama. Raw and fast-paced, the film begins with a bang and never lets up. The action starts when a young boy is gunned down on the street in a case of mistaken identity. The actual target is not much older: He is Omar (Shahir Kabaha), a sweet-faced teenager and de facto head of his family, who is trapped in the midst of a blood feud with a Bedouin gangster family thanks to his uncle, who has shot and wounded a member of the clan.

Omar turns to his boss, restaurant owner Abu-Lias (Youssef Sahwani), a Christian Arab and the father of Hadir (Ranin Karim), with whom Omar is having a secret affair. The unofficial “Godfather” of the neighborhood, Abu-Lias brokers an agreement with the Bedouin family: If Omar pays them $57,000, the fighting will stop. Desperate for money, Omar finds himself sinking into the underworld of drugs and violence.

If this reads like standard Mafia fare, other threads in the plot are more directly situated within the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Omar’s friend Malek (Ibrahim Frege) sneaks into Jaffa daily to earn money for his mother’s bone marrow transplant. Malek works alongside Omar in the restaurant but must stay indoors and hide every time the police come through. Another friend, Binj (played by co-director Copti), is a carefree spirit whose plans to escape Ajami and move in with his Jewish girlfriend get derailed after an act of violence.

Rounding out the main characters is Dando, a brutish Israeli police officer who treats his young family with tenderness and is tormented by the disappearance of his brother—presumably kidnapped en route from his military base. How Dando fits into the other storyline remains ambiguous until the movie’s end, though anyone who has seen Crash will be waiting with dreadful anticipation.

Tensions abound, not only between Jews and Arabs but also between Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs, Arabs and Bedouins and, most poignantly, between Palestinians who live inside and those outside the Green Line. Malek, who is from a nearby village in the West Bank, is mocked for not understanding Hebrew, which the Arabs of Ajami switch into and out of seamlessly. And yet, they refuse to speak Hebrew to Binj’s Jewish girlfriend, of whom they disapprove. When Malek’s neighbor from the West Bank needs a place to sleep in Jaffa for the night, Malek’s Arab employer refuses, leading the neighbor to observe, “Those Arabs of Israel—We talk about collaborators; they are much worse.”

The crowded Ajami neighborhood is a pressure cooker, where a fight over a noisy sheep can prove fatal, and an attempted arrest of a known drug dealer by Israeli police can explode into a street riot. Although no one in the movie is ostensibly religious, a traditional culture pervades the neighborhood, ensuring, for example, that a Christian and a Muslim would never marry. Omar and Hadir, the illicit lovers, must secretly meet in Tel Aviv, where anonymity is a breath of fresh air. Ironically, of course, for those from the West Bank, Ajami is a place to escape “to,” not “from,” and vans transporting workers like Malek sneak across the border every day to reach the Jaffa neighborhood.

The scenes of Ajami were unscripted, and the film stars a cast of nonprofessional actors, many of whom hail from Ajami’s environs. Indeed, the life stories of some are similar to those of their characters: Ex-policemen play policemen, a woman who has lost loved ones to gang violence slips easily into a character worried about just that. The film often feels like a documentary, with a shaky camera style that lends a gritty authenticity that is brutal to watch. Indeed, many of the film’s extras thought they were appearing in a documentary, not a work of fiction. And in a peculiar case of life imitating art, Copti’s brothers were arrested in February in what they call a misunderstanding and authorities say was an assault upon a police officer.

The film offers few prospects to the Ajami residents who must live their lives with the stress of unrelenting conflict. Like Boyz in the Hood and The Wire, Ajami is at heart a meditation on the city’s youth culture and the clumsy mistakes of young people trapped in hopeless situations. “On the count of three you will open your eyes and find yourself in a different place,” repeats one character throughout the film. “One, two, three, open your eyes.” But the film sends a reminder that the plight of Ajami’s youth is unlikely to change anytime soon—no matter how many times they close their eyes.—Sarah Breger