Tutti pazzi a Tel Aviv

A fairly lighthearted but insightful look at life of the middle-class in Jerusalem and Ramallah-- as seen by having a Palestinian screenwriter who lives in Jerusalem travel to work in Ramallah and his daily interactions with the Israeli border-patrol chief..

The film is a little slow, and the main character is made out to be a little too dull, however on the whole the film has a charm and addresses a subject rarely broached. It's an interestingly balanced portrayal of the people on both sides caught in the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As characters in this film, both the Israeli soldiers and the Palestinian film makers are more human than political agents, and yet both are rooted in their respective historical contexts making it hard to get to the next level of cooperation with each other. The film plays around with alternate narratives.

The film writer/director is actually an Israeli Palestinian, giving the film much authenticity.

It's a pleasant surprise how a Palestinian film about a very serious issue could be funny at all. But this one pulls it off rather nicely.

The approach to make a film within a film works beautifully in this one. And the result is pure comedy.

The viewer heartily laughs at the seeming incongruity of Salam's situation. He has to cross the border daily to go to the West Bank where he works as a film production assistant and finding himself in a bind one morning after making an innocuous remark to an Israeli border guard. This silly encounter and its immediate outcome changes his life forever.

Kais Nashif is naturally funny as Salam. Yaniv Biton as Assi is credible as the border commander. His interaction with Salam as they finish the script of the soap opera is hilarious. And the ending is a marriage of convenience of sorts. It's one that satisfies extremists on either side of the aisle.

The message of the film is simple: promote the peace when each side listens to the other. Assi thinks so.

This film was an absolute pleasure to watch. It is rare, in my experience, to find a foreign comedy that still works as well for me, an American, as it might for a native speaker of the language. I also expected much more in terms of heavy subject matter than I got in the film. As much as it is about the conflict in the Middle East, the conflict is more of the backdrop and subtext than the main action we are given.

There isn't a lot in the cinematography or editing that is super amazing but it is all serviceable and doesn't get in the way of the story, even if it doesn't add much either.

The main draw for this film is the acting and writing. Both of these work in tandem to create characters and situations that we are able to identify with and laugh at without getting so wrapped up in projecting the themes of the movie across in an obvious or pointed way. It never feels preachy but keeps its lightheartedness in tact so you are surprised when you get to the end of the film and find that you are still thinking about coexistence and getting along with people who are different than us.

The humor in the film is deftly done, not giving in to the temptation to be total parody, although some small amount is required, and also not giving in to total realism, slamming one side harder than the other as the writer's political views accidentally bleed through the page. It never gets so serious that you feel like the writer just has an axe to grind for a particular political party nor does it stray so far into satirical farce that you can really watch it and call it frivolous. It is both true to life and ridiculous at the same time.

There were definitely things in this film that were hard for me as an American to understand. I'm not super well versed in the history of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and thus don't immediately know an Arab from a Jew just by looking at them or even from a quick glance at a uniform. This made it somewhat difficult to know what side of things certain characters were on at certain points but it was never so bad that I felt I had missed the point of the movie. It actually got me more interested in reading more about the history of the region. I definitely feel that there were certain jokes I didn't get , though, because of this cultural ignorance on my part just the same as I'm sure some of the TV Production scenes would have been less funny to someone who hadn't worked in the industry before.

All in all, it was a pretty great film. I laughed a lot and really appreciated the creative solutions they found to the main conflicts in the film which predominantly revolve around Palestinian/Israeli issues. This film is a great example of how humor can be used to bring a level of humanity to people that we are all tempted to believe are simply expressions of common stereotypes or political straw-man.

Tel Aviv on Fire is a jubilant comedy about Israel and Palestine, grazing the absurd on serious subjects. The interactions between the different characters from either Israel or Palestine are a veritable delight. The movie Tel Aviv on Fire is about the shooting of an eponymous soap opera, a kind of an imaginary remake of the pathetic and immortal Febbre d'amore (1973), taking place in Tel Aviv and dealing with love between Israelis and Palestinians, during the Six-Day War, with spies, double agents, generals, terrorists and tutti quanti.

The movie is essentially based on these three characters: 1) Tala is the lead actress within the soap opera, coming from France. She is a middle-aged starlet, a seductive and manipulative woman, and regularly gazes at her own navel. She is played by Lubna Azabal, moving and sublime in La donna che canta (2010). 2) Salam is a somewhat clumsy but endearing man who, thanks to a happy combination of circumstances, will be promoted co-scriptwriter on the series. Of course, as human as he is, he will use his new position, a bit for himself, in order to win back his beloved darling. 3) Assi is a guard at a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, and is terribly imbued with his person to a point that makes him hilarious. His megalomania allows him to interfere in writing the script!

This movie is definitely a must see: the trio Lubna Azabal, Kais Nashif and Yaniv Biton is a 'bomb' (an absurd and two-penny joke, freely inspired from the movie).

The laid back subtle and satirical humor is mostly effective here. Somehow, Sameh Zoab, director and co-writer with Don Kleinman, pulls it off despite all the political turmoil that has encased the region for so long now.

The acting is first rate as well, and I thought the surprise and clever ending enhanced the movie. Overall, quite the engaging surprise with its positive message.