Saturday, March 13, 2010 7:00pm
6 days in the lives of Eyal , an Israeli living in a kibbutz, and Rana , a Palestinian living in Paris, which starts with an accidental meeting in the Berlin Subway during the World cup finals, will change them completely. Eyal, who came to meet his accidental girlfriend, and Rana who came to cheer the French team, are forced to share as apartment and spend three intensive days together.
"Foul Gesture" Saturday, April 10, 2010 - 7:00PM
An offensive hand gesture sets into motion a tragic series of events in director Tzahi Grad's tense tale of one man who refuses to bend to the powers that be. It's Holocaust Memorial Day, and Michael Klienhouse's wife, Tamar, has just flipped 60-year-old war hero Dreyfus the finger. Enraged at the blatant act of disrespect, Dreyfus punches the gas of his car and nearly kills Tamar when he drives directly into her door. A law-abiding citizen who only wants justice for his wife, family man Michael is shocked when the authorities tell him that there is little they can do about the incident. As it turns out, Dreyfus has some pretty powerful friends, and never seems to have lost his battlefield mentality. Stunned by the willingness of police to overlook the incident and sent into a downward spiral of powerlessness, Michael finds himself newly invigorated as he sets about procuring a gun and seeking justice on his own terms.
LEMON TREE - Saturday, May 8, 2010 @ 7:00PM
Salma Zidane (Hiam Abbass), the proud, handsome 45-year-old Palestinian woman at the center of “Lemon Tree,” an allegory of Israeli-Palestinian strife, has the misfortune of living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Widowed for 10 years, with a son in the United States, Salma earns a meager living from a lemon grove on the Green Line separating Israel from the occupied territories of the West Bank. The grove has been in her family for 50 years. Her solitary life suddenly turns upside down when the Israeli defense minister, Israel Navon (Doron Tavory), moves into a fancy new house that abuts the grove. Overnight a watchtower is constructed, and security guards and soldiers begin patrolling the property. No sooner have Navon and his beautiful, cultured wife, Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), moved into the new house than Salma receives an official letter informing her that the grove poses a security threat from terrorists hiding among the trees; as a military necessity they must be uprooted. The letter, which Salma has translated because she neither speaks nor writes Hebrew, loftily offers to compensate her for her loss while mentioning that because of recent legislation, there is no legal obligation to do so. She weeps at the news. Thus begins an escalating war of words and of wills. “Lemon Tree,” directed by the Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis, whose 2004 movie, “The Syrian Bride,” explored Israeli-Arab border tensions, is also a wrenching, richly layered feminist allegory as well as a geopolitical one. — Stephen Holden, The New York Times