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Ajami Movie Review

Ajami is a 2009 Israeli crime drama film directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani. It’s a flawed, but pretty well made and important movie.

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“A guy was murdered in Jaffe.

The whole department worked 24 hours non-stop.

I haven’t slept, because the kids drove me nuts.

Bless their hearts“

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The film features five different stories of people living in the Ajami area in Israel. It traces how different communities bond in a society, ridden with severe cultural and communal conflicts. This area in Israel is the most ethnically and religiously diverse part of the country, which obviously comes with its fair share of issues, most well explored in this complicated movie that includes dozens of characters and different POVs.

At a time when Palestine is under the danger of entirely disappearing, Ajami is even more relevant than when it was released back in 2009. The movie was directed by two filmmakers, one a Palestinian and other an Israeli man. This was a superb choice that led to a compassionate, unbiased depiction of both groups, truly admirable for the time. It led to the movie being nominated for an Oscar and it was the best foreign nominee that year.

The biggest flaw here is the structure that doesn’t lend itself well for engaging storytelling. It is reminiscent to the reviled Best Picture winner ‘Crash’ in the quick pace and jumping from one character and situation to another. This whiplash of different ideas, circumstances and problems explored led to a somewhat convoluted movie that at times lost itself in all of the mayhem.

Ajami, thus, never get to properly develop all of its characters, which made rooting for them difficult. Still, most of these stories were layered and surprisingly realistic, forgoing easy and dumb distinctions between ethnicities and religions in favor of a complex sociopolitical landscape that its setting demanded.

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The editing is okay, though it could have been better. The movie is not paced well at all, but the directing is strong and the acting is solid across the board. The dialogue is fantastic and we hear both Hebrew and Arabic, which lent the movie a lot of authenticity. Its urgent tone and a humanistic depiction of its characters are its biggest strengths.