ANA ARABIA
Israel, France / 2013 / 85 min.
Director: Amos GITAI
[Introduction]
A film that employs phenomenal camerawork to capture relationships between the Jewish and Arab residents of an old residential area on the outskirts of Tel Aviv in a single shot. It quietly explores the theme of co-existence that GITAI has pursued in works such as "Wadi Grand Canyon". Screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival.
Amos GITAI
Director's Statement
The story of Ana Arabia is based on several sources. One of them is a little news item, which appeared also in European press about a woman in Umm el Fahem, a village in the North of Israel. She went to see her doctor due to a loss of calcium. He told her that she might have been malnourished when she was a child. Her head was covered like all Muslim women, yet after much hesitation, she told him that she had actually been born in Auschwitz.
Through this woman's story we discover a very rare tale of friendship and love - especially rare in this region of so much hatred and conflict - between this Jewish woman born in Auschwitz and her Muslim husband. It's said that they had 5 children and 25 grand children. This initiated my research on how to tell this story, which breaks those borders of prejudice and hostility. I also referred to the series of documentaries I did over the past 20 years: the first one in 81 (WADI), then in 91 (WADI, TEN YEARS AFTER) and in 2001 (WADI GRAND CANYON 2001). Those films describe a group of Arabs and Jews in Wadi, in the north of Israel, their biographies and fragments of their biographies.
