Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

JPfanatic93 Not the best way to tackle a topic about identity. The first act of the movie differs in huge ways from the last and despite a light touch of wry humour applied to the scenes between both, you cannot help but wonder how the one (d)evolved into the other so distinctly. Opening on a comedic tone bordering on the absurd, at the end of the film you're watching a heavy emotional drama about a young man's life altered forever. Of course people change over the years, especially under the less than perfect conditions the protagonist lives through, but the viewer has a hard time accepting the unfolding of events in the way told here, and ultimately feels like he/she is watching two separate movies slapped together. It's not wrong to apply some humour to a topic otherwise devoid of that sense, especially if it helps to underscore both parties have more in common than apart. But it must feel like a coherent whole to make it work for audiences. In some ways, the writer says that any sense of optimism Israeli Arab youths harbour in their country will only be squashed by the rampant discrimination they undergo in their formative years, and thus they will inevitably end up as unhappy, pessimist young adults. Maybe that is exactly what the screenwriter wants us to think, considering it's the conclusion he himself drew eventually, which made him move to the USA for good. At the same time however, the plot tells us there is plenty of positive things that could have avoided the bleak outcome presented here. It's not like the protagonist didn't have any friends or couldn't find love. Eventually, it was his own choices that hindered his career as much, if not more so, as the social exclusion on which the film closes.It's not the Arabs that are dancing in this film, it's the writing that makes the plot dance around various possible outcomes and makes it pick the bleakest where it need not have, and considering the tone of the opening, should not have. Case in point: the life of the writer himself, who did very well in his career despite very similar conditions. And it's the audience that suffers most, by being offered a rather unsettling and unsatisfying close.

Red-125 The Israeli film "Dancing Arabs" was shown in the U.S. as "A Borrowed Identity." It was directed by Eran Riklis. The movie stars Tawfeek Barhom as Eyad, a Palestinian boy who is an Israeli citizen. Although his plight isn't as bad as a non-Israeli Palestinian, he is nonetheless a second-class citizen. (Palestinian citizens work in restaurants as dishwashers. Jewish citizens work as waiters.)Despite being Palestinian, Eyad is allowed to attend a prestigious Israeli boarding school. Naturally, he's the target of racial slurs, but he isn't physically injured, and he moves forward toward adulthood. As part of a class assignment, he meets Jonathan (Michael Moshonov), a young man who has progressive muscular dystrophy. He also meets an Israeli girl, Naomi, played by Daniel (Danielle) Kitsis. Naomi is intelligent and loving, but the question is whether their relationship has a future, because of their cultural and religious differences.The plot moves in unexpected directions, and the movie is emotionally powerful and gripping. The acting is excellent, and I think the plot represents a balanced picture of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, as it plays out among individuals.We saw this movie at the Little Theatre in Rochester, as part of the highly successful Rochester International Jewish Film Festival. The film will work well on the small screen.

jakob13 Eran Riklis in collaboration with gifted writer Sayed Kashua has brought to the screen a thoughtful and riveting film based on Kashua's 'Dancing Arabs'. Released in North America as 'A Borrowed Identity', it unfortunately is shown only in select art houses, to a limited audience. 'Borrowed Identity' has come on to the American scene at a time of racial and ethnic tension, which in the US context is a reflection of the strain in defining who and what a person is. Kashua's script is informed in the ongoing debate in Israel for its Arab citizens of what its means to be an Israeli, at a time of rabid Jewish nationalism: at a time when the degenerative Zionist elite dreams of expelling 20 percent of Israel's population, i.e., Arabs of the right of citizenship. 'A Borrowed Identity', in a Hegelian trope, in a rude dialectic informs us that the only way Eyad, a gifted Arab Israeli, can find complete fulfillment in Israel is to become a Jew by assuming the identity of Jonathan, his doppelganger, who dies after a long bout of muscular dystrophy, with the complicity of the deceased Israeli's mother. Riklis' film should strike a chord in America in the light of the Rachel Dozeal brouhaha, whereby a white woman passes as black. The connection is problematic? And the climate in the US is hardly welcoming for understanding the plight of Arab citizens of Israel, who, as it turns out, are 'les negres d' Israel'. There is nothing to fault in the probing eye of Riklis' camera. Yael Abecassis is as ever the embodiment of discernment as Jonathan's mother, the young Tawfeek Barhom has a shrewd understanding of the film's protagonist Eyad; he infuses his character with a delicate understanding of the transformation of what Hegel calls the alter ego and then becoming Jonathan. However the love angle is predictable, but creditable, and shows the limits of Israeli liberalism. Above all, the talents of Riklis and Kashua have produced a film worthy of prizes, which the hands of less talented artists would render 'Dancing Arabs' cartoon like if not soppy in sentimentality.

maurice yacowar Eran Riklis manages a touching humanist film that should engage and expand both sides of the Arab/Jewish divide in Israel — and beyond.It follows a bright young Arab boy Eyad, whose intelligent father — consigned by his earlier political activity to a career as fruit-picker — gets him into the country's premier Jewish high school. With that family as its centre the film obviously reveals the Arabs' difficulties in the (understandably) wary Jewish country. The Arabs make up 20% of the population, so they understandably chafe at soldiers checking their IDs and teachers' snide remarks and the conviction the system is prejudiced against them. Arabs steam in the kitchen while the Jewish boys get the better paying jobs as waiters. As Eyad's father summarizes it, "We want to live in dignity." Eyad's experience broadens when a community service project leads him into a friendship with Ionathan, a Jewish boy crippled with MS. He also has an affair with a bright, pretty Jewish student, Naomi, whose parents pull her out of the school to end their contact. To enable her to return, Eyad gallantly leaves the special school and studies for his exams on his own, while working in restaurants. His father disowns him in anger and disappointment.Riklis is careful to present the Jews' perspective as well. An Arab teacher teaches the map of Palestine — denying Israel — then unrolls the Israel map when the Jewish principal enters. Eyad's father and friends are certain Saddam Hussein will repel the US attack and destroy Israel in a few days. His mother knows better. The Arabs dance on their rooftops when they see the scud missiles fired at Israel.But that image does not explain the title. As Riklis told the Palm Springs festival audience, he had two other contexts in mind. Mainly the phrase suggests the Arabs' restriction to servicing (figuratively: dancing for) the Jews, whether in the kitchens or cleaning up their mess (as Eyad more heroically does for his stricken Jewish friend). He also recalled the Jewish proverb about not being able to swing one behind at two weddings at the same time. Servant Eyad is indeed torn between two dances, the Arab and the Jewish, when he ventures beyond his enclave. At school his summary of the 1948 war is the Jewish version, unshaded, but in a later discussion of Jewish contemporary fiction he details the conventions of Arab stereotypy.The two boys' mothers provide the film's moral center. Eyad's Arab mother — who has the stereotype Jewish nose — tacitly supports her son's love affair with the Jewish girl. Her concerns give way to her love and support. Ionathan's mother embraces Eyad for the comfort and life he brings her worsening son. When Ionathan nears the end, Eyad uses his passport to assume his Jewish identity, getting a waiter's job, then opens a bank account in his name to deposit the checks. Ionathan's mother is initially disturbed to discover that ploy, but when she confronts him she immediately softens at his need and promises to keep his secret. In response Eyad writes the high school exams both in his own name and in Ionathan's, securing both their graduations with identical honours. Eyad loses his beloved grandmother. Naomi denies him to win a spot on the Special Intelligence army unit. Eyad goes to university in Berlin, returning for Ionathan's last days. Then comes the film's astonishing climax. It's completely unexpected and yet perfectly inevitable. Ionathan's mother gives her son a Muslim burial under Eyad's name, to enable Eyad to pursue his life under her son's name, freed from the stigma of being an Arab. As Eyad's mother accepted her son having a Jewish lover, Ionathan's embraced her son's Arab friend. She asks him to live with them to ease her strain. Her climactic gesture reverses but fulfills the remarkable prophecy by Golda Meir: There will not be peace until the Arabs decide they love their children more than they hate the Jews. Both boys mothers' realize that; Naomi's doesn't. The message is that peace will be impossible unless both sides abandon their traditions of hatred and war. This Jewish mother abandons her religious tradition, turns her back on the past, to ensure a better future for the next generation of Jew and Arab together. We know her feeling for her Judaism from their sabbath dinner with Eyad. So we gauge the sacrifice she makes for her son's friend. Of course, in assuming the Jewish identity Eyad also abandons his past, including his family and culture. So profound is the schism that only a break with the past will bridge it. Eyad's elementary school is visited by a fatuous presenter of some Children for Peace movement. The film's climax plays out the deeper implications of that hope.