This is perhaps the best film I’ve seen in the last few years. A small Egyptian police band gets stranded overnight in small town Israel. With no hotel in the town, two of the locals agree to take in the band members for the night.
The story breaks off into three storylines, each one a conversation between a local and a visitor: two struggling middle-aged men, a grieving man and a lonely woman, and two young men who couldn’t be less alike. They all engage in unexpected conversations with someone they would otherwise never encounter. “Jew” & “Arab” slowly fade away and we see that they are all so familiarly human, with the same loneliness and longing as anyone else.
This is my favourite scene from the film. A young band member (Haled), who clearly has a way with women, goes out with a young Israeli (Papi), who clearly doesn’t. They’ve been at the roller skating club for a while now and Papi is too scared to even talk to his date.
As we begin the scene, the man (dancing with a woman) that Papi speaks to is his friend who set him up on this blind date to begin with (sorry, no subtitles). He tells his friend that the girl he set him up with is crying. His friend offers no help at all. But that’s OK, because Haled steps in and guides Papi the rest of the way in what is a perfect, one-take silent film:
