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

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.

The Kite Runner (Afghanistan 2007, 127 min, dir: Marc Forster, cast: Khalid Abdalla, Shaun Toub, Homayoun Ershadi)

The short list of films shot in Afghanistan includes The Kite Runner, Kandahar, and The Horsemen. All are journey films, but The Horseman is about travels in country, whereas the other two are travels to the country. In The Kite Runner, Amir leaves California for his homeland, honor bound to find redemption for a horrible mistake of his youth.

The core of the story is this: Amir was born Pashtun. That means he is entitled to everything. His childhood friend Hassan was born Hazara: meaning he is entitled to nothing. Understanding this starts to make some sense of Afghani tribal society and the winless war we fight against the Taliban.

The story that peels like an onion: exposing new layers and filled with tears. Amir learns the secret of his childhood relationship with Hassan, and what he must do to redeem himself. There’ more to The Kite Runner than just seeing the movie. Do a search in Netflix for the 1971 film, The Horsemen, starring Omar Sharif (it is so rare that Amazon and eBay sell copies for five times the normal price). The Horsemen was shot in Afghanistan long before the Russians invaded, and long before the Taliban even had a name.

Seeing the rough, tribal way of life among primitive peoples (with Omar Sharif playing an Afghan) is an ethnographic experience. Add to that the artificial legs in Kandahar, and the brutal sodomy of the Taliban in The Kite Runner and you begin to understand a country few in the West have bothered to know. And then read Robert D. Kaplan’s “Soldiers of God” and Rory Stewart’s “The Places In Between.” And then see The Kite Runner.