Israel
Adam Sweeting
Lior Raz is Israel’s very own man with a very particular set of skills. However, unlike the looming 6ft 4in Liam Neeson who plays Bryan Mills in the Taken films, Raz is stocky, shaven-headed and clocks in at a mere 5ft 7in.He’s not your standard off-the-peg action hero, but he packs some serious credentials. He served in an undercover counter-terrorist unit in the Israeli army, and later moved to the USA and was hired as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodyguard. He funnelled his experiences into the Israeli-made series Fauda, a fraught portrayal of anti-terror operations in the West Bank.Now Raz is Read more ...
Avi Avital
The mandolin is an instrument everybody has heard of without necessarily knowing much about it. Its history has been written by lovers of the instrument, often amateur players who are drawn to its approachable and appealing character, integrating it into their own lives, and in turn popularising it throughout the world.More than virtually any other instrument, the mandolin stands for different things depending on time and place. In the 18th century it was the preserve of the wealthy in salons across Europe; by the late 19th century and early 20th it had become popular among the middle classes Read more ...
Chen Reiss
I am not the first to say this, and I won’t be the last, but what a strange year 2020 has become! I am learning afresh what it is to be both a singer and a parent and, although we have all been kept closed in our little home “bubbles,” we are learning what our world and culture looks like to those outside the “music bubble” – about how society values the arts and how different countries have been approaching the problems we are all currently facing.The other day I came across a survey where people in Singapore had been asked to list the top five essential and non-essential jobs during a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Tamar, a character in “The Husband”, one of the most appealing, joyful stories in Nicole Krauss’s new collection To Be a Man, spends summers with her feisty mother in Tel Aviv, leaving her New York apartment in the care of a house sitter. When she returns, she has the feeling that she is not really needed by her life in New York, that she’s superfluous to it.Existential questions about place and time, with its “reckless authority”, and about Israel and Jewishness as well what it means to be in a relationship, whether as a woman or as a man, recur in To Be a Man, and these ten stories Read more ...
graham.rickson
Raed Andoni’s semi-documentary Ghost Hunting (Istiyad Ashbah) is nominally "about" the Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners but is an effective, potent denunciation of human rights abuses across the modern world. Andoni’s booklet introduction includes the sobering statistic that more than four in 10 Palestinian men are, at least once in their lives, arrested or investigated in Israeli prisons, some as young as 12. Andoni himself was held and tortured as a teenager at al-Moscobiya detention centre, and this 2017 semi-documentary is partially an attempt to exorcise his demons. As he puts Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Solo plays and performances are, of necessity, the theatrical currency of the moment, whether across an entire season at the Bridge Theatre or last week at the Old Vic in the too briefly glimpsed Three Kings, starring a rarely-better Andrew Scott. This week's blink-and-you-miss-it offering, pre-recorded (unlike the Scott entry) but also available online for a few days only, is a new production courtesy the Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester, of Martin Sherman's 1999 play Rose, which premiered at the National before transferring the following year to Broadway. (A percentage of ticket sales are Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Yoram (Menashe Noy), a vet in a Tel Aviv safari park, knows how to treat a sick jaguar (startling to see such a magnificent beast in an oxygen mask) but he has no idea how to comfort his troubled 17-year-old daughter Roni (a powerful Zohar Meidan). Both are mourning the death of Roni’s mother a year ago, but all they can offer each other is a tortured silence.Writer-director Nimrod Eldar’s first feature, which premiered on HBO in February in the USA, is quirky and atmospheric, with extraordinary desert scenes and a bracingly unpretentious, understated feel to Yoram and Roni’s knotted Read more ...
theartsdesk
At the end of an exhausting day's driving punctuated by disappointments and false leads, the narrator finds herself back at the Israeli town of Nirim where she spends the night. Slipping off early in the morning, she first fills her eyes with the view of Gaza on behalf of her colleagues who grew up there and now live in the West Bank. Driving south, she stops at a cluster of houses that might be a forgotten village.–––––I keep driving, past barren hills that slowly turn into pale yellow sand again, while the traffic diminishes until there are no other cars. Now, the only movement belongs to Read more ...
theartsdesk
The second half of Minor Detail is narrated in the first person by a young Palestinian woman who reads an article about the rape and murder of the captured girl. When she finds out the crime took place exactly 25 years before her birth, she determines to visit the archives to find out as much as she can about the girl and the case as possible – but for that, she needs to travel out of the West Bank. The journey is not far in miles, but as a Palestinian it is not straightforward.–––––I call the author of the article, an Israeli journalist, and try to pass myself off as a self-confident person Read more ...
theartsdesk
The first half of Minor Detail is set in an Israeli military camp in the Negev desert in August 1949, during the conflict celebrated as the War of Independence in Israel and a year after the mass expulsion mourned as the Nakba in Arabic in which around 700,000 Palestinians permanently fled their homes. It follows a senior military officer in charge of reconnaissance. After days of searching among the dunes, his patrol eventually comes across a group of Bedouins at a spring. After the patrol guns down the men and their camels, the commander brings the girl who has survived the slaughter back Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
To Christos Tsiolkas fans expecting something in the vein of his riveting bestsellers The Slap and Barracuda, the sixth novel by this Australian writer may come as a shock. We're not in Melbourne any more. Damascus is a serious historical enterprise, a biblical and rather heavy-handed one, exploring the story of Saul of Tarsus, later St Paul.There’s a lot of raw, visceral squalor in this brutal Roman world 35 years after Christ’s death, and the testament according to Tsiolkas is full of stonings, castrations and other ghastly punishments. Damascus addresses questions of class, shame and doubt Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Cakemaker is Ofir Raul Graizer’s debut feature, and the film must somehow reflect the parabola of the Israeli-born director's life: it’s set between Berlin and Jerusalem, the two cities apparently closest to him, and one of its main subjects – alongside weightier themes such as grief and loss – is food, especially the rich experience of cooking. (Graizer’s biography records how he studied film, as well as – a phrase you don't expect to find in such contexts – “trained in kitchens as a cook and will soon publish his own Middle Eastern cookbook”.) The result is independent cinema at Read more ...