Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Beaufort (Israel 2007, 131 min, dir: Joseph Cedar, cast: Oshri Cohen, Eli Eltonyo, Italy Tiran, Ohad Knoller)

Beaufort is a ghost story without ghosts. This ancient mountain fortress, straddling a strategic valley in southern Lebanon once sheltered the Crusaders. Now Israeli soldiers huddle within its cold walls; about to be the next ghosts of the fort’s history.

Armies have come and gone, each using fortress Beaufort for the same purpose: to block movements of armies below. The Crusades are an unlikely metaphor for the last withdrawal of IDF (Israeli Defense Force) troops at the close of the Israel’s Lebanon adventure in 2000. But the grim pile of stones these men are leaving has a history of a thousand years before Israel and Hezbollah took up positions.

Liraz (Oshri Cohen) commands his unit of bored, frightened, and brave soldiers waiting out the days and hoping they are not the last to be killed by roadside bombs or daily rocket attacks. Each day his men dive for cover, each night they run for their lives at the real or imagined sounds of the enemy crawling up beyond the walls.

Why they are here, why they were ever here? This is the question the film asks. Like Waltz with Bashir (MovieWithMe), Beaufort looks at the Israeli incursions into Lebanon as an exercise in nihilism. What good came of it, what good can come of it? The politics of conquest always way the heaviest on the conqueror; momentary solutions are rarely history’s solution.

If you make war on Hezbollah to control the politics of Lebanon, what is the message to Hamas in Gaza? And if you build a wall around the West Bank of Palestine to shut out suicide bombers, does it shut in hate? Like the French in World War One, the Israelis seem to build one Maginot Line after another, and each fails before the concrete is dry.

All the men defending Beaufort are young; all yearn for home. All have long since given up hope of understanding the events that are killing them. In the last scene, the commander of Beaufort, now safely back behind the gate that separates Lebanon from his Israel, kneels on the ground and spreads his arms. He is home at last. But then, what makes it home? The gate?

The release from the nightmare of Beaufort? Or is the last scene only the first of another story now being told that includes the youth uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and Iran? And when will it be Israel’s time to try another turn towards its enemies, or continue building the country into its own Beaufort, stone by stone?

Alila (Israel 2003, 123 min, dir: Amos Gitai, cast: Yael Abecassis, Amos Lavie, Uri Ran Klauzner, Ronit Elkabetz, Hana Laszlo.

Put a dozen Jews in an apartment building in Tel Aviv and no one will set foot in it except the tenants. Hezi (Amos Lavie) is the secretive lover who rents an apartment for his mistress, Gabi (Yael Abescassis). Ezra (Uri Ran Klauzner) is the constructions boss building an addition under the instruction of Ronit (Ronit Elkabetz), who turns out to be a policewoman. Mali (Hana Laszlo) is Ezra’s ex-wife Gabi’s friend and confident. She lives downstairs with her new lover and Ezra’s son who is AWOL from the Israel Army. Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz on who is who.

Add to this stew a few elderly residents bordering on dementia and a dog. The action centers on the lovers, because Gabi is a screamer during sex. Hezi is paranoid about being discovered by his wife, so he tries to silence her with a hand over her mouth. But the dog hears her anyway and starts barking.

When the police come to hunt down Ezra and Mali’s son who has disappeared from his Army unit, they notice Ezra’s work crew is all illegal Chinese immigrants.

So while his son has vanished into the streets where the cop warns, “he could be the victim of terrorists,” Ezra is hauled off to the police station handcuffed to one of his Chinese laborers.

But the police sergeant turns out to be Ronit, his customer in the apartment house who is supervising the renovations. She lets him off with the warning, “Give me a good price.” (also see her in Late Marriage, on Movie With Me. You would hardly recognize her from Late Marriage to Alila).

Many directors have done apartment house or neighborhood street movies. Alex de la Iglesia’s La Comunidad (Movie with Me) and Jorge Fons’ Midaq Alley (aka: El Callejon de los Milagros) are two. One house of assorted crazies and con artists and lovers is a perfect place for intense character relationships. In Israel, as Ezra says, “Everyone is out for themselves.” This is true outside of Israel, but here it exists with the background of terrorism and suicide bombings.

Gitai is a great observer of human vulnerability in all his films. It is his calling card. Don’t come to a Gitai movie for past pacing and action. The rewards, like a leisurely read of a juicy novel, are always pleasurable but you need have the time to savor them.

James’ Journey to Jerusalem (Israel 2003, 87 min, dir: Ran’anan Alexandrowicz, cast: Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe, Salim Dau, Arieh Elias)

A man who believes in Utopia comes to the Utopian world and finds it is no longer the place of dreams. He is the only prophet left. James speaks Zulu and comes to Israel on a mission to see Jerusalem and report back to his little village about its wonders.

Instead he finds himself enslaved in a cruel economic system set up to exploit illegal foreigners. He learns the people of the Promised Land have lost all connection with The Holy Land.

The premise may be shocking to modern day Israelis who tend to intellectualize the faults of their country. Films like Lemon Tree (MovieWithMe) present aspects of injustice that stems from misunderstanding and political dilemmas. James’ perception is more basic.

He comes as a pilgrim looking for the place God has declared holy because it is where sin stops and truth begins. That may sound Christian but let’s not forget the Jews, “Let he who is without sin ascend this holy place.”

You’re only supposed to grab the Torah with clean hands, but that is not what James finds in his Israeli adventure.

Once he catches on, he quickly learns to make his way among the exploiters. It works for a while; until righteousness overtakes him and he can’t go on playing the game.

Israeli society can’t comprehend James and doesn’t want to try. It’s much easier to deport him. In his last moment, he catches a glimpse of the way to Jerusalem.

This is a movie that drips with anti-Israel sentiments. Jews are fast to pass this off as hate propaganda. But they should look a little deeper. The criticisms here are of a system of underclass exploitation that has distorted the founding vision of the country. The Israelis portrayed are sometimes sympathetic and always complex. Too often they are comfortable in the world they have built on the backs of others.

James is an innocent searching for the wonders of the Holy Land amid the rubble of high rise hotels and low rise schemers. The sadness of the movie is our understanding that his message will be lost, even if it is dead on right.

Nina’s Tragedies (Israel 2003, 110 min, dir: Savi Gavison, cast: Ayelet Zurer, Alon Elkabeth, Shmil Ben Ari).

Young Nadav lusts after his sexy Aunt Nina by peeping in her window and writing lustful stories in his diary about her. When Nina’s husband dies in a bomb incident while in the Army reserves, Nadav’s mother sends him temporarily to live with Aunt Nina so she won’t be alone. From the spare room he gets to observe all the twists and tragedies of her love life.

Soon Annon installs himself as her perfect lover. Actually he was part of the Army detail who came to inform her of her husband’s death (in a great bit of humor, they soldiers on the detail get the wrong apartment and inform the wrong widow. She faints, but manages to scream out “You want Entrance B” as she recovers. (the unit next door-see the clip).

Annon is everything Nina wants. He is sensitive to the point of crying, he is poetic, and he is dedicated. He also has a girl friend. What make Nina’s Tragedies so watchable are the little twists between tragedy and humor. Like the naked man Nina sees in the street who resembles her husband. He turns out to be the boyfriend of a Russian woman who is a buddy of Nadav’s peeping Tom accomplice. So it goes.

The film would not have worked if not for Shmil Ben Ari (Annon), who seduces not by sweeping Nina off her feet, but by crying over her tragedies. What an original twist on a guy trying to prove he is sensitive. Meanwhile Nadav is coming of age in this cozy world of lust and irony.

Some movies work so much better on the small screen, and I think this is one of them. In a theater Annon’s crying would be unsettling. We would think, “Get over it.” On an intimate screen his over-the-top emotions are just perfect.

The Secrets (Israel 2007, 127 min dir: Avi Nesher, cast: Fanny Ardant, Ania Bukstein, Michal Shtamier)

Lots of settings for lesbian relationships, but an Israeli girls’ religious boarding school is unique. The daughter of an Hassidic scholar refuses to marry the sexless, boring pupil of her father and goes away to boarding school instead. There she meets another student who will be her lifelong friend and sexual companion.

Anouk (Fanny Ardant) is dying of some unspecified cancer and, as a school assignment; the two girls have volunteered to look in on her. She’s the driving force of the film because she offers a life view that is vibrant and intense.

The experience with Anouk becomes enlightening to the girls’ own lives, freeing them as they try to free her from her past (she went to prison for a crime of violence). Eventually she dies, and the girls discover their love for each other. When one chooses to get married, the other is overcome with grief. The fiancee, who knows about the relationship, tells them that he can live with the secret, and the bond between the girls can continue within the marriage.

Wow, this is heavy stuff for orthodox Jews. A culture that can’t even show a bare ankle is showing every emotion. The brilliance of Nesher’s film is it never departs from being human. The girls are schoolgirls. Their dates are klutzes. The scene where they double date and the guy gets up and takes the table cloth with him is as funny as any Adam Sandler movie.

Even though Fanny Ardant’s part as the dying muse looks kind of melodramatic on paper, it plays beautifully on film. And the mikvah scene (ritual bath) with the three of them naked is tasteful and natural (see clip). Too bad for the porn industry. If there was a market for Hassid Porn this scene could spawn a classic. But The Secrets is a very tasteful, emotional movie that you can have fun watching but you can’t make fun of.

Walk on Water (Israel 2004, 103 min, dir: Eytan Fox, cast: Loir Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters).

This Israeli film asks whether there is really a purpose anymore in the Israeli final solution of killing old Nazis. Museums are being built everywhere to chronicle the Nazi’s “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jews, but what about the Israeli’s state sanctioned retribution?

Trained as a hit man whose life is measured in assassinations, Israeli agent Eyal (Loir Ashkenazi, also in Late Marriage on MovieWithMe.com) is ordered to kill an elderly ex Nazi mass murderer “before God does.”

The way to flush this old Black Shirt out of hiding is to get close to his granddaughter and grandson. Pia (Caroline Peters) lives in Israel as a kibbutz worker and maintains close contact with her gay brother, Axel (Knut Berger). Eyal manages to befriend them both. Although his purpose is information, he finds himself drawn into their picnics on the sand and running barefoot.

For I guy who doesn’t even take his socks off between killings, this is a major life change. Little by little, he learns their view of humanity. It offers a reboot of history by seeing a bigger picture than Jews versus Germans.

A song by Esther Ofarim that Axel plays on the car radio while driving Eyal to the family home in Wansee, outside Berlin (coincidentally, the town where the Final Solution was hatched back in 1942), underscores the point of the movie. Ofarim is an Israeli who sings in German. She’s built up a huge following in Germany where her music symbolizes the improbable bond between the two cultures.

He doesn’t know they’re driving to attend Axel’s grandfather’s birthday party, where Eyal will get the chance to give the old man a final present from the Mossad: death.

The strength of this movie (mainly in English, with some subtitles for the Hebrew and the German) is two cultures pushed to confrontation: the diabolic Nazi killer and the new assassin under the same roof. The former is a feeble old man. The latter has to confront the question of why he is doing what he is about to do.

Eyal faces a moral quandary he can’t answer. So he drives back into Berlin to talk to his boss. The way back form the western suburbs takes him on Hitler’s first autobahn. (You can’ t make a film in Berlin without running on or over a lot of history). His boss, the Mossad chief, is calling the shots form his hotel room. Eyal suggest they capture the old man and smuggle him to Israel for trial (like the Israeli’s did with Adolf Eichmann decades before). He argues that that it makes no sense to kill an old man who is near death anyway.

“Terminate him before God does,” is the boss’s answer. It is the logic of the efficient and practical assassin with no room for the questions of why. Eyal drives back to Wansee. “Why” is the question on his brain, and then “how”? While he is pondering, Axel takes the moral high ground and frees Eyal from his dilemma. Meanwhile sister Pia gives the promise throughout the movie that sex is so much better without moral confusion.

Easy for me to see the lighter side of Eytan Fox’s film very rich and thought provoking film; but this doesn’t take away from it being an extremely intelligent, effective, and watchable movie.

Turn Left at the End of the World (Israel 2004, 130 min, dir: Avi Nesher, cast: Neta Garty, Liraz Charchi, Aure Atika).

When Helen Thomas, the longest running White House journalist ever, told the Israelis that it was time to leave Palestine and go back to Poland:nobody protested they weren’t from Poland. Instead they labeled her an Alzheimered anti-Semite and force her to quit. Too bad. Nothing important ever happens at White House press briefings, and at least the room looked fuller with her in the front row.

But once again the Israelis lost a public relations opportunity. If they were cool they would have sent Helen a DVD of Turn Left at the End of the World. We all know the story of the Holocaust survivors finding refuge in Israel, but who knows about Moroccans and Indians? Nobody every said to the Jews, “Go back to India.” And yet many India Jews are descended form the lost tribe of Manasseh, conquered by the Assyrians back in BC days and not taking any messages for the next 2000 years.

In the 1960s Israel was the refuge and hope for Jews from all over the world. Avi Nesher focuses his film on a tiny outpost at the edge of the Negev desert where the government shunted new arrivals. When we arrive the small kibbutz has already been inhabited by Moroccans and is receiving new families from India. They are all immigrants, all Jews. But as everyone knows, put two Jews in a room and you have an argument.

The Moroccans see themselves as French, and the Indians are more British than the British. They bristle at working on the production line in the bottle plant (the one industry), and form a cricket team. The Moroccans, being French, strike the plant and complain about how they are underpaid. The Moroccans speak French, the Indians speak English, and nobody speaks Hebrew very well.

Avi Nesher makes this small, remote settlement a paradigm for the confusion and vitality of this new country. A big part of the vitality is sex. Aure Atika, the very sexy French actress (Movie with Me: The Beat My Heart Skipped) is the Moroccan widow who starts an affair with the Indian father of her daughter (Nicole’s) new friend. Meanwhile Nicole seduces the local schoolteacher, Asaf. (see the clip).

The movie advances with several stories, like a good novel. The characters slowly learn Hebrew and understand they have left their identities and cultures somewhere beyond the desert. The only thing important now is what they are becoming: Israelis. The future is everything and, if they can only settle the strike at the bottle plant, it is very hopeful.

Maybe the Israelis should see Turn Left at the End of the World along with Helen Thomas. It is about the quilting of a new nation. Today that tapestry seems threadbare.

The Syrian Bride (Israel 2004, 97 min, dir: Eran Riklis, cast: Clara Khoury, Hiyam Abbass, Makram J. Khoury)

Marrying within your faith means finding your husband-to-be on a TV news show. Your parents can’t come to your wedding and you can never come back. Ethnic Chinese? Hutus? No, Israelis. The Druze is an ancient Arab tribe of warriors and religious independents that got caught between the lines of Syria and Israel in the1967 war.

Since then, they’ve lived in a no-man’s land between the two countries. They are recognized as citizens of Israel (they trace their lineage and religion to Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses). Because they are recognized by Israel, the Syrians won’t let them in unless they renounce their Israeli citizenship. But they must marry within their religion and the Druze singles scene is in Syria (actually, there are so few Druze they have their own world-wide dating site, Druze Cafe. Take a look at some Druze cuties).

Director Eran Riklis builds his story on the Catch-22 that plagues the Golan Druze. She lives the Golan. He lives in Damascus where he hosts a Syrian TV show she watches. They’ve only met by phone and mail. To marry, she must renounce her Israeli citizenship, and walk into the no man’s land between the borders. Her only witness will be a UN inspector. Once married,  she will enter Syria and never be able to come back home. It would be funny if it were not so sad.

Leaving everything you know for an unknown life with a stranger is the dramatic conflict on which Riklis builds his story. In Lemon Tree, also reviewed on MovieWithMe.com, the conflict is: the price of security is walling out humanity. Both films star the amazing Hiyam Abbass, who seems to have carved out a career as the long-suffering Arab who wears the weariness of generations on her face.

The Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree, Laila’s Taxi (different director) are all political films that explore society, not sociology. As director Riklis said to Tikkun magazine, “I see myself as a relevant director. I believe in movies that relate to political and social circumstances. I think it’s impossible, particularly in Israel, to say that what happens around you is of no interest to you, that you are an artist and that you make movies like the Americans do. In Israel, you have to acknowledge that you live in a very complex and problematic region.” If there is hope for a peace plan in Israeli, bet on the filmmakers.