‘Syrian Bride’ Weds Simple Tale, History
Clara Khoury and Hiam Abbass star in \”The Syrian Bride,\” where bureaucracy is an uninvited guest.
Clara Khoury and Hiam Abbass star in \”The Syrian Bride,\” where bureaucracy is an uninvited guest.
The year is 1999, and on the Israeli TV miniseries, \”Catching the Sky,\” Nurit walks into her Tel Aviv kitchen at the crack of dawn to find her husband doing something completely shocking and inexplicable.
In \”Janem, Janem,\” Aldi (Danny Rytenberg), a 40-year-old high school teacher, heads south to an enclave of foreign workers who reside in small, crowded hovels in the no-man\’s land of the old Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. It is there among construction workers from Romania, Turkey and Russia that Aldi — without language, family and identity — finds true love and meaning for his life.
In the film \”What a Wonderful Place,\” ex-cop Franco (Israeli Oscar winner Uri Gavriel) has to work for a cruel and shady underground boss, but he finds kinship with an illegal Ukranian worker who teaches him to swim while he protects her from immigration officers.
Both films will screen in Los Angeles at the 21st annual Israel Film Festival.
There is an old Jewish saying that if you change your place, you change your luck. The organizers of the 21st annual Israel Film Festival are putting it to the test.