‘Dancing Arabs‘, the Israeli film made in 2014 by Eran Riklis on a script written by Sayed Kashua adapting his debut novel includes some memorable scenes. One of them, which I do not hesitate to declare brilliant, succeeds in less than a minute to describe one of the sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The scene takes place in a school in an Arab city in Israel. The teacher gives a lesson to students by using a map of Palestine and using the Arab narrative of history. The school principal enters the classroom with an American visitor. In a fraction of a second, the teacher covers the map with another, where the same territory is called Israel, and changes the explanation to the official Israeli version. A scene worthy of Ephraim Kishon. Two peoples claim the same territory and both regard it as their homeland. Each of them has its own version of history, completely divergent versions. Parallel realities, virtual identities, the dialogue seems impossible.
Eran Riklis, the Israeli Jewish director, and Sayed Kashua, the Arab Israeli scriptwriter, are trying to explore in their film this exact theme: are dialogue and coexistence possible despite historical, religious and nationalist conflicts? Perhaps an elite school in Israel, a country that aspires to be pluralist and democratic can provide a framework for the formation of generations that overcome conflicts through reason, knowledge, love for truth and beauty? Perhaps the love story between two teenagers will break the walls of mistrust and melt the hearts of others around, including their parents? Or maybe the solidarity and compassion for those affected by incurable diseases will help others overcome the artificial barriers between people who are otherwise surprisingly similar in many ways? The greatest achievement of the film is that Riklis and Kashua manage to tackle these delicate and painful subjects with humor and without dogmatism. The story of the young boy from Tira coming to study in the Jerusalem elite school is beautifully told on the screen and is moving at many moments. But the conclusion is far from optimistic. The very solution proposed by the book and the script of the film is an renunciation, a concession that not everyone who lives here is ready to do, or some may accept only on a personal level. The story tells us that coexistence and even survival are only possible through a change of identity. Some of those who wrote about the film noticed that the solution does not seem plausible for Israel in the years 1989-1992 when most of the film is taking place, and even less so today. I do not think the film’s authors did not know that. On the contrary, proposing a slightly utopian solution, I think they just wanted to achieve the opposite effect – to show that overcoming the conflict is only possible by adopting solutions that at one time or another would seem unrealistic.
The first part of the film has many comic scenes, especially in the sequences describing the stereotypes used by the two peoples in the description of history and in the relationships between them, and their outcome in everyday life. In the background, the tragic events of the first intifada are permanently present, but the tone succeeds to be relaxed while punctuating some important truths, without being escapist, vulgar or rhetorical. The second part leaves the place to something close to soap opera, but this does not seem out of context either, this being after all a very popular genre in the Middle East. What also helps is the very exact acting of the young actors team, supported by better known Jewish and Arab actors, among whom Yaël Abecassis cannot be skipped. ‘Dancing Arabs‘ is a film worth seeing or seeing again five years after its realization, with the regret that the reasons of optimism about what is happening in this part of the world have not multiplied in the meantime.