San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2013

[Chris Knipp]

Ziyad Douari: The Attack (2012) - SFJFF CENTERPIECE FILM


REYMOND AMSALEM AND ALI SULIMAN IN THE ATTACK

Irreconcilable differences

Ziyad Doueri's The Attack provides an obvious setup. When Amin Jaafari, a distinguished Palestinian surgeon in Tel Aviv, gets a major Israeli award, there is a terrorist bombing and his wife, killed in the incident, becomes the prime suspect. This is a complete shock to him.

We get the point: even a thoroughly assimilated Palestinian awarded a national honor by Israeli society still finds his security and sense of belonging hang by a thread. The doctor, after treating the injured, is himself a suspect and is held for brutal interrogation but later found innocent and released. His colleagues at the hospital nonetheless pass around a petition to strip him of his Israeli citizenship. But a few Israeli colleagues remain utterly loyal. Incredulous and now angry at his wife whom he seems no longer to know or understand, Dr. Jaafari goes to Nablus to investigate, at considerable personal risk, the sources of the bombing, starting with his own and his wife's family.

This is a setup to show Palestinian rage and the impossibility of a Palestinian's assimilating into Israeli society. But it's not a very obvious setup, after all, because this can't be a very typical case. Surely Palestinians who've won distinction in Tel Aviv don't turn out to have wives who are suicide bombers -- or do they?

This was also scheduled as the centerpiece film at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 30 (Castro Theater, San Francisco) and Aug. 4 (California Theater, Berkeley). Debuted at Teluride, then Toronto, fall 2012; limited US theatrical release Jun2 27, 2013. Screened for this review at Angelika Film Center, NYC, July 10, 2013.

For the full review see Filmleaf's Festival Coverage section for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival here.