Friday, November 20, 2009 East Central Illinois

11th Annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival 2009

Director, distributor 'bask' in warm Virginia Theatre reception

By: Melissa Merli
Sunday, April 27, 2008

When film consultant Hannah Fisher saw Israeli writer-director Eran Kolirin's directorial debut, "The Band's Visit," at the Cannes Film Festival, she "flat fell in love with it."

The first film showing Jews and Arabs relating together as human beings, it's filled with "much tenderness and humanity," she said Saturday at Roger Ebert's Film Festival, after "The Band's Visit" was shown.

So, as a senior programmer for the Dubai International Film Festival, Fisher thought Kolirin's movie about an Egyptian municipal band stranded in an Israeli desert town would have been perfect for the cultural bridge category of the Dubai festival.

The organizers disagreed, apparently for political reasons. A similar thing happened after the film was "disinvited" from the Middle East International Film Festival: Abu Dhabi, a week before the festival opened.

"The Band's Visit" also failed to receive an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film after Israel submitted it in that category.

Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, the U.S. distributor of the movie, said Academy members timed the dialogue with a stopwatch, figuring that more than 50 percent of it was in English, so decided to disqualify it.

"To me, this is a bit crazy," Barker said onstage at the Virginia Theatre after the Ebertfest screening. "The English was kind of pidgin English. We had to subtitle it in English anyway.

"The Academy Awards also disqualified (Ang Lee's) 'Lust, Caution' because it wasn't 'Taiwanese' enough. That category is a very important category to the world, and I think the Academy has to improve it. Some of us feel it's a disservice to the film."

However, Barker noted that "The Band's Visit" has been seen and warmly received in so many countries that "we should bask in that." And Kolirin, also on the Virginia stage with Barker, Fisher and film expert Mary Corliss, seemed to take it all in stride.

"No one thought it would be popular until it became popular," he said. "Everybody thought it was a kind of slow film that nobody would see."

The genesis of the simple yet profound film came to Kolirin as he imagined the restrained protagonist Tewfiq, played by Sasson Gabai, wearing a robin-blue military uniform as conductor of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra and singing a song in Arabic.

"There was a contradiction between something melodic beating underneath the uniform, the strict exterior and the outbursting interior," the 35-year-old writer-director said.

The film opens with the eight-member Egyptian band at an Israeli airport, waiting for a bus to to take them to an Israeli town where the band is to help open the new Arab Cultural Center.

Finally a bus arrives but drops the band off in the wrong place, a small desert town where restaurant owner Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) tells them there is no Arabic cultural center and no Israeli culture for that matter.

The next bus won't come until the next morning. There is no hotel. She offers to put up Tewfiq and a younger band member, the Chet Baker-obsessed Haled (Saleh Bakri), at her house overnight. Three other orchestra members stay at the family home of one her friends, and the others spend the night in her diner.

"And then begins a night of guarded revelations, shared isolation and tentative tenderness," Ebert wrote in his review. "Life has given (Dina) little that she hoped for. Tewfiq is a man with an invisible psychic weight on his shoulders. Haled, under everything, is an awkward kid."

As Ebert wrote, amusing interludes take place among other band members and Israelis and while the film doesn't provide any narrative payoffs, it offers something more valuable: "An interlude involving two 'enemies,' Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as ordinary people with ordinary hopes. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty."

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