Before its release, this movie was given a subtitle. It's now "Dancing Arabs: A Borrowed Identity." Just as well. The only dancing I recall in the movie is dancing around the loaded issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The young protagonist is the only Arab in his school, and he makes friends with individuals while suffering discrimination in the broader social structure. It's no new observation that individuals from opposing groups can get along fine even as those groups as a whole seem to insist on remaining irreconcilable. The author of the story, Sayed Kashua, has been accepted by Jewish Israeli society while still identifying with the Arab community that is largely anti-Israeli, and the movie shows Arab hostility as counterproductive on the one hand while also showing the behavior of some Israeli Jews-- again, not so much individuals as groups-- as intolerant. According to Kashua, the movie is roughly autobiographical. With his books, along with a series of newspaper columns and a comical TV series about the stresses of being an Arab in Jewish-dominated Israeli society, Kashua won plaudits in Israel and this movie was set for a big opening when, as will happen, war with Gaza broke out. The opening was postponed for some months. At more or less the same time, Kashua received an opportunity to take up a temporary position in the USA and when he left Israel he declared glumly that he wasn't sure he would ever bother to return. So a pall is cast over the film, although the film itself is a good job from Eran Riklis, whose movies are often about individuals on a journey that helps them understand who they are.
Review of A Borrowed Identity
