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VENICE 2013 Competition

Ana Arabia: listening to the film

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- Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitaï presents in Venice a film in the form of a dialogue, a nostalgic truce, bustling with sad and fabulous accounts, in a small hidden garden, away from the world

Ana Arabia: listening to the film

More than a “spoken film”, Ana Arabia [+see also:
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film profile
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by Amos Gitaï, presented in competition in Venice, is a film (composed of a single long take) to listen to, which goes from character to character, and as is it unveiled, delves into their personal history and that of their separate community, isolated in space and time.

Our guide in this journey is Yael (Yuval Scharf), an Israeli journalist who has come to investigate, in the neighbourhood where she grew up, a woman who recently passed away, a Jewish Polish survivor of the Holocaust who, upon arrival in Israel, converted to Islam out of love for her husband Yussuf (Yussuf Abu-Warda). However, what Yael discovers in this strange group of ruined houses and wild vegetation lost in the middle of a modern city whose limits she crosses at the beginning of the film and only exits again at the end, with a shy tear in the corner of her eye, is much more than a single story, but rather a whole constellation of romantic and nostalgic accounts that resonate like tales. While she came to listen to the impossible and incredible love story between a Jewish woman like her and a man of the “opposite” religion, she uncovers a multitude of beautiful and painful relationships and an entire spectrum of female characters.

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The listening attitude of the beautiful journalist, which never becomes invasive nor imposes direction to her interlocutors but rather accepts to follow them, allows us to know at the same time she does (the account unfolds in real time) this small self-sufficient neighbourhood (“we have everything we need here”, old Yussuf often repeats) which is a world of itself, a world left behind that scrapes by, with its old but still fresh wounds, but also a world that remembers a time when Jews and Muslims cohabitated and spoke to each other.

As she meets Yussuf’s children, her scarred stepdaughter, his neighbours and friends, attentive Yael realizes she has entered a haven, a place of truce. As Miriam (Sarah Adler) says, the daughter of the old man, where plants and weeds are left to grow freely, people don’t through away garbage, and when Yael, at the end, leaves this surprising garden, this single tear that rolls off her cheek seems to say that she knows that she has left a universe which no longer exists.

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(Translated from French)

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