The Policeman

Azulai is a policeman working in Jaffa whose incompetence at the job is matched only by his soft heart. His superiors want to send him into early retirement because he cannot finish anything properly. But the man wants to stay in the force, and strangely the criminals of the neighbourhood do not want him to go either; everyone has grown used to him. The film makes its comedy out of bureaucracy and the way institutions measure a person, yet it does not mock Azulai. The account keeps the sad and the comic in the same scene. The end of the account offers no solution; it leaves where the man will stand to the viewer. Shaike Ophir plays the lead in Ephraim Kishon’s eighty seven minute Israeli film, completed in 1971.