Tel Aviv on Fire

Salam lives in Jerusalem and works on a soap opera shot in Ramallah. His job is language; he is on set so that the actors' Hebrew is right. He crosses a checkpoint every day. One morning the commander stops him. Assi watches the series; his wife watches it too and he wants to know what will happen. Salam introduces himself as a writer. Assi starts giving him ideas about the script. Salam takes those ideas to the set and they work. Now he really is a writer. But Assi also says how the ending should go, and the producers want a different one. Sameh Zoabi directs and co-wrote the screenplay. Kais Nashif plays Salam and Yaniv Biton plays Assi; Lubna Azabal and Maisa Abd Elhadi are in the cast. It is a Luxembourg, French, Israeli and Belgian co-production. Kais Nashif won the best actor award in the Orizzonti section at the Venice Film Festival for the part. The matter it treats is who a story belongs to; both sides watch the same series and each wants its own ending. The film does not show the conflict directly; everything happens at a checkpoint and on a set. The narrative uses the shape of comedy and mocks both sides. The series within the film is a spy melodrama and those passages are deliberately overblown. The narrative offers no simple message of peace and says the situation will not change. Its ending is not a reconciliation but a puzzle of a solution. Its limit is depth; the narrative stays light and the political ground is treated on the surface. Who it is for: viewers who like political comedy and Middle Eastern cinema. Who it is not for: it is light, conventional, and the ending easy.