Israel. Highly Recommended.
The movie is centered on a small family of Bedouins living on their ancestral lands in what is not the State of Israel. Something I did not know: Bedouins are not necessarily nomadic, land is just as important to them as it is to everyone else in that land crazed part of the world. In this case the land looks pretty much like just a patch of desert. What they un-ironically call a village is some corrugated metal shacks, a few sheep pens and a generator. So here is another great SIFF movie that drops us into the everyday lives of people who, at best, we only otherwise see in our rear view mirror. These dwellings would not be legal in any normal country and therein lies the main driver of the story. A lot of the movie is of the lets-follow-this-guy-around-for-a-few-days variety which can be completely boring or, as in this case, pretty interesting. It depicts the relationships between the Jewish and Arab Israeli citizens in a way that I suspect is much more like the real thing than we usually see. Even the representatives of the overbearing bureaucracy are portrayed as decent people.
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