Jerusalem

SITTING in a darkened movie theater one recent morning, I had to suppress the urge to clap along as a dozen young male adherents of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov — well, actors playing Breslovers — danced around their black-hatted rabbi to an improvised ditty, “Ani lo yodea klum,” Hebrew for “I don’t know anything.” The rabbi had started the romp with that simple statement, trying to explain that wisdom was in the text for the taking. The Hasidic men, rowdy yet reverent, took up the chant, and soon the whole study group was on its feet, a memorable moment of relief in “God’s Neighbors,” an intense feature about conflicts between religious and secular Jews.

A few hours later, in a neighboring theater, it was hard not to smile as I watched five middle-aged Palestinian men — not actors, for this was a documentary — dancing their own improvised jig, under a flimsy tin roof in the West Bank village of Bilin. As part of an ongoing protest against the security barrier Israel has built, and the isolation of their village and the confiscation of some of the village’s land, the men had erected their own outpost, the occupied playing the occupiers. Joyous if beleaguered, they clapped and chanted just like the Breslovers, creating a similarly lighthearted respite in the heartbreaking chronicle of the years-long Bilin struggle, “Five Broken Cameras.”

These two films, each portraying one of two key conflicts vexing Israeli society, were among 26 Israeli movies screened this month at the 29th annual Jerusalem Film Festival. Recently arrived to cover Israel and the Palestinian territories, I inhaled nine of the films — six documentaries and three features — over a week in hopes of gleaning some insights into the people, places and production values of my new beat.

It was, to be sure, an imperfect experiment — I chose films in part based on scheduling around my reporting and child care demands. But it is always interesting to see how a society presents itself on the silver screen, and there was a striking repetition of certain images and themes despite the range of topics and styles. I am no film critic, so I offer here just some humble notes on what I saw.