Haifa International Film Festival boasted homegrown highlights

• Published date: 26 September 2021
• Author: HANNAH BROWN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The Feature Film category is closely watched at Haifa and a number of movies that have won it in past years have gone on to do well at the Ophir Awards, the prizes of the Israel Academy of Film and Television. The Ophir Award ceremony will take place in October this year and the two movies with the most nominations were both shown at Haifa: Avi Nesher's Image of Victory, which was screened out of the competition, and Eran Kolirin's Let It Be Morning, which took part in the competition.

Due to the fact that the festival runs during a holiday, I was not able to see all the Israeli movies, but I did catch Let It Be Morning. Kolirin's 2007 movie, The Band's Visit, was a moving, crowd-pleasing story about an Egyptian orchestra that gets lost in a Negev town and the connections the musicians make with the locals, which was eventually turned into a Tony-Award-winning Broadway musical. Kolirin's subsequent movies have not worked nearly as well, but Let It Be Morning, which had its world premiere at Cannes this year, is definitely his strongest film since The Band's Visit. Although the Arab cast members refused to attend the Cannes premiere as a protest directed at the Israeli government, they did come to Haifa for the opening night.

cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); });

>

A pointed commentary on the political situation, based on a novel by Sayed Kashua, Let It Be Morning works as a drama and black comedy because the characters are so well-drawn and appealing. Alex Bakri plays Sami, a hi-tech executive who lives in Jerusalem and feels like he has it made, with a beautiful family and a mistress as well. But as Sami visits the village where he grew up to attend a family wedding, the army suddenly seals off the area, because they are looking for Palestinians hiding there illegally, including a father and son building a second home for Sami, that he does not really want. His life quickly starts to fall apart as his wife, Mina (Juna Suleiman) confronts him and lets him know that she is aware of his affair, and he begins to worry that his job is not as secure as he had thought it was.

THE PERFORMANCES are wonderful, particularly Suleiman, who is so sexy and wise you want to shake Sami for cheating on her. Much of the movie is about the divisions among the Arabs, not only the Palestinians and the Israeli Arab citizens, but also those who are politically conservative and...