AJAMI

 Whatever we think we know about the Arab/Israel conflict on the ground, we probably don't and we are unlikely to learn much about the political side of the conflict from Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani's remarkable debut. "Ajami" might feel at times like a scripted documentary or at least a piece of neo-realism and deals, not with the wider picture but with a series of vignettes, told in chapters, of everyday life within the Ajami community where Muslims, Jews and Christians co-exist together. To complicate matters, the chapters don't run chronologically and the stories and characters seem only tenuously linked and although we frequently hear the words 'Jews' and 'Arabs' tossed about these stories could take place in the slums of Naples or in New York's Hell's Kitchen. In other words, this is closer to a gang movie than a political film though, of course, set as it is in Israel it is very much a political film.

The cast are largely non-professional and it all feels very real yet the two directors film it in such a way that we are about half way through the film before the plot begins to tie together or to make sense. This is a difficult film, perhaps a little too clever at times for its own good, but it remains a superb first feature that dares to take what we might think of as familiar material and twist it into unrecognizable shapes. Perhaps this is the kind of film Tarantino should be making.