Once, not long ago, a small Egyptian Police band arrived in Israel. They came to play at an initiation ceremony but, due to bureaucracy, bad luck, or for whatever reason, they were left stranded at the airport.
They tried to manage on their own, only to find themselves in a desolate, almost forgotten, small Israeli town,
somewhere in the heart of the desert. A lost band in a lost town. Not many people remember this. It wasn’t that important.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT (ERAN KOLIRIN - Director and Script Writer)
When I was a kid, my family and I used to watch Egyptian movies. This was a fairly common Israeli family practice, circa the early 1980’s. In the late afternoon on Fridays, we’d watch with bated breaths the convoluted plots, the impossible loves and the heart-breaking pain of Omar Sharif, Pathen Hamama, I’del Imam, and the rest of that crew on the one and only TV channel that the country had. This was kind of weird, actually, for a country that spent half of its existence in a state of war with Egypt, and the other half in a sort of cold, correct peace with its neighbor to the south.
Sometimes, after the Arab movie, they’d broadcast a performance of the Israel Broadcasting Authority’s orchestra. This was a classical Arab orchestra, made up almost entirely of Arab Jews from Iraq and Egypt. When you think of the IBA orchestra, maybe the custom of watching Egyptian movies ceremony sounds a little less odd.
The Arab movie has long since disappeared from our screens. TV became privatized, and has sunk out there among the five hundred fifty seven or who knows how many channels that have descended on us. And then the IBA orchestra was disbanded. We got MTV and BBC and RTL and “Israeli Idol” and pop songs and 30-second commercials. So who cares about quarter-tone songs that last half an hour any more?
Afterwards, Israel built the new airport, and they forgot to translate the road signs into Arabic. Among the thousands of shops they built there, they found no room for the strange, curling script that is the mother tongue of half of our population. It’s easy to forget the things that H&M and Pull and Bear and Levi’s etc. make us forget. Over time, we’ve forgotten ourselves too.
A lot of movies have been made touching on the question of why there is no peace, but it seems that fewer have been made about the question of why we need peace in the first place. The obvious is lost on us in the midst of conversations centering on economic advantages and interests. At the end of the day, my son and my neighbor’s son will meet, I am sure of that, in some neon-blinking mall under a giant McDonald’s sign. Maybe that’s some kind of comfort, I don’t know. What’s certain though is that we’ve lost something on the way. We traded true love for one-night stands, art for commerce, and the human connection, the magic of conversation for the question of how big a slice of the pie we can put our hands on.
This audience-pleasing sensation of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and winner of eight Israeli Oscars follows the comic plight of the Alexandrian Police Orchestra. These eight slightly bewildered Egyptian officers, after getting lost at the airport, arrive in a remote, slightly empty Israeli village, their powder-blue uniforms standing out against the desert landscape. Fortunately, they connect with Dina, a ballsy, sexy café owner (Ronit Elkabetz, three-time winner of the Israeli Oscar), who helps them find lodging for the night. In the very first images of his first theatrical film, writer-director Elan Kolirin displays a mastery of low-key deadpan visual humor in the manner of Tati and Jarmusch. By the movie’s second half, however, he pushes boundaries as several of the characters unexpectedly confront what one refers to as “tons of loneliness.” With its precise portions of tact, irony and sweetness, Director Eran Kolirin’s film gives ‘humanist cinema’ a good name, and offers yet another example of the resurgence of Israel’s vibrant, provocative and increasingly varied film culture.
The movie was selected to be Israel’s Official Submission to the Best Foreign Language Film Category of the 80th Annual Academy Awards (2008), but it was disqualified by AMPAS because more than 50% of film’s dialogue was found to be in English, as opposed to Arabic and Hebrew.
The Movie Won 13 International Awards:
Won Best Actor (Sasson Gabai),Best Actress (Ronit Elkabetz),Best Costumes (Doron Ashkenazi),Best Director (Eran Kolirin),Best Film,Best Music (Habib Shadah),Best Screenplay (Eran Kolirin) and Best Supporting Actor (Saleh Bakri) at Awards of the Israeli Film Academy 2007.
Won Un Certain Regard - Jury Coup de Coeur (Eran Kolirin) at Cannes Film Festival 2007.
Won Special Mention (Sasson Gabai & Ronit Elkabetz) at Flanders International Film Festival 2007.
Won Audience Award at Sarajevo Film Festival 2007.
Won Golden Eye (Eran Kolirin) and New Talent Award New Talent Award at Zurich Film Festival 2007.
SCR: Eran Kolirin
DIR/SCR: Eran Kolirin
PROD: Eilon Ratzkovsky, Ehud Bleiberg, Yossi Uzrad, Koby Gal-Raday, Guy Jacoel
CO-PROD: Sophie Dulac, Michel Zana
DP: Shai Goldman
ED: Arik Lahav Leibovitz
PROD DES: Eitan Levi
MUS: Habib Shehadeh Hanna
CAST: Sasson Gabai, Saleh Bakri, Khalifa Natour, Ronit Elkabetz, Rubi Moscovich, Uri Gabriel
More information about the great movie you can find in the official web site here.
