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

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.

Laila’s Birthday (Palestine, 2008, 71 min, dir: Rashid Masharawi, cast: Mohammad Bakri, Areen Omari, Nour Zoubi).

Does anyone born in the Gaza strip still have a sense of humor? There’s no shortage of movies about the Israeli point of view, but what about the Palestinians? Rashid Masharawi was born in the strip, but he’s still (at least in2008) able to find dark humor in the situation.

Abu is a taxi driver. Actually he is a judge, but there is no money to pay judges. In fact, no one wants to hear his pitch for new judicial job because his taxi is parked in a driveway blocking a delivery. He put on his best suit, took his briefcase, and rushed to the interview even though today is his daughter’s birthday and he must buy her a cake.

Cakes are more difficult to find than stinger missiles. While having coffee and waiting for his tire to be fixed, an incoming Israeli missile blows up the other end of the street, He runs to claim his taxi but it is on its way to the hospital with the wounded. At the hospital he finds his taxi but one of the survivors who needs to be driven home.

Does this sound like the Passover song, Chad Gadya? (The fire came that burned the goat that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat which my father bought for two zuzim). And on and on through the trials of everyday life in the occupied, (or disputed) territories.

Finally he does get to buy a cake and take it home for the final moment where he sings happy birthday to his daughter along with his wife. When she asks, “How as your day,” he replies, “Nothing special.”

Laila’s Birthday is dark, amusing, and informative. Who relates best to this humor? The Israeli’s, of course. Too bad they can’t all sit down together and laugh at each other’s movies.

Lemon Tree (Israel 2008, 106, dir: Eran Riklis, cast: Hiam Abbas, Ali Suliman)

If you’ve seen recent Israeli movies, you know Israel has already lost the war. Art usually precedes events. A nation that walls off its enemy while reserving the right to invade at will is blind: even with night vision goggles. Anything said of the Israelis can apply to us. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Viet Nam are not yet finished. At some point our guns will not protect us.

Lemon Tree is a simple tale about a backyard fence erected in the name of security. Nobody dies, nobody goes to prison. But nobody who puts up the fence thinks of the human cost. The human cost is what new Israeli films are about. Waltz with Bashir, also on MovieWithMe.com, is a complex narrative about Israeli sanctioned slaughter. Here as well, the human cost-not only to the enemy but to the Israeli soldiers: is never factored in. Films like these speak to moral fractures that can only widen.

In Lemon Tree, the new Israeli Defense Minister decides to build his dream country house right on the border with West Bank Palestine (a little improbably, but what the hell). His neighbor across the wire is a Palestinian woman who has been tending the lemon grove that was planted by her father. The minister’s security men decide the lemon grove offers potential cover to terrorist encroachment, and must be cut down. They offer to compensate the woman, but she doesn’t want the money, she wants her land and her lemons.

A young Palestinian lawyer takes her case and argues all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. He achieves a partial victory: they will cut down the trees near the border fence, and leave some of the ones farther away. It doesn’t help, and the person who seems to understand her plight, and her powerlessness the most; is the wife of the Defense Minister. They eye each other across the backyard border throughout the movie, yet meet only once, briefly, in court. Their eyes seem to ask: is this the only way we can live, do we actually understand each other better than we know?

In their rush to seal the border against all threats are the Israelis never pausing to see their enemy is also human? Regardless of your feelings on the politics, the performance of the Palestinian woman and her lawyer are so rich and subtle that the film is always engaging and human. Haim Abbas carries the weight of the Palestinian people in her eyes.