So after sneaking off to catch DARK HORSE and BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL, I was back at the SF Jewish Film Festival for the late show.
We started with the short SAVIN, which had most people in the audience shaking their head but might be my favorite short of the festival (well...maybe not. SEVEN MINUTES IN THE WARSAW GHETTO was pretty amazing.) It's simply a shot of Savin, a fan of the soccer team Hapoel Tel Aviv, as she watches the game. No shots of the actual action, just her and the rest of the cheering section reacting. I love that I could follow the game just by following her reactions. Hapoel went up a goal, then gave up two. Then they thought they scored the equalizer but it was called back for offsides. I could even tell when there was a great cross but the shot went just wide.
And that had absolutely no relation to the feature film, the comedy MAN WITHOUT A CELL PHONE. It's a comedy about Arab Israelis and the generation gap. An Israeli telecom company puts up a cell phone tower in the middle of an Arab village. The young people are happy--cell reception has never been better. But sour-faced farmer Salem doesn't like it. He believes it's destroying his olives and giving everyone cancer. So he organizes a protest. Of course, his son Jawdat needs his cell phone for business--or at least the business of juggling multiple girlfriends at once. Then there's his latest girlfriend's brother--a police officer who is kind of overly protective. Oh, and then there's his backup girlfriend in Ramallah--calls there have drawn the interest of the national security forces. Funny and political.
Total Running Time: 94 minutes
My Total Minutes: 295,510
No comments:
Post a Comment