This movie has many good points and one obvious flaw. The good points are its production, acting and story. Dancing Arabs captures perfectly the Israel of each time it portrays and the two solitudes that Jews and Arabs live in. Israeli Arabs and Jews may have lived in the same land for 50 years (the years portrayed) but still don't trust or even respect each other. Today, the situation is even worse. That is the main message of the movie and the message comes across well and relatively unbiased.
The flaw that keeps it from receiving a higher rating from me is the ending. It's fair enough that Eyad tries to escape the discrimination that Israeli Arabs suffer by taking the identity of his Jewish friend, Yonatan who dies from ALS. It's clever enough to "kill" Eyad by burying Yonatan as Eyad the Arab. Edna, Yonatan's mother goes along with this in her grief to have a son. The book must have some other tricks to make the deception work because people don't die in Israel without an official death certificate being registered. With Yonatan officially dead on state computers, Eyad would be caught sometime down the road when he tried to transact some kind of official business.
My bet is that he would be caught on his way out of Israel to resume his German studies by the army's computer checking to see if he had done his National Service. The real Yonatan would have had an exemption because of his disability yet there he would be walking around ben Gurion Airport with a knapsack. This would not compute. I need to read the book to see how the author got around that one.
The flaw that keeps it from receiving a higher rating from me is the ending. It's fair enough that Eyad tries to escape the discrimination that Israeli Arabs suffer by taking the identity of his Jewish friend, Yonatan who dies from ALS. It's clever enough to "kill" Eyad by burying Yonatan as Eyad the Arab. Edna, Yonatan's mother goes along with this in her grief to have a son. The book must have some other tricks to make the deception work because people don't die in Israel without an official death certificate being registered. With Yonatan officially dead on state computers, Eyad would be caught sometime down the road when he tried to transact some kind of official business.
My bet is that he would be caught on his way out of Israel to resume his German studies by the army's computer checking to see if he had done his National Service. The real Yonatan would have had an exemption because of his disability yet there he would be walking around ben Gurion Airport with a knapsack. This would not compute. I need to read the book to see how the author got around that one.