Ajami review ★★★½

It is amongst the winding Ottoman streets of Ajami that we meet Omar, the elder brother of Nasri, struggling to save his family from a Bedouin feud it had accidentally become entangled with; Abu Elias, a community leader, 'fixer' and restauranteur; Malek, a Palestinian smuggled in from the West Bank and working illegally at Abu Elias's restuarant, desperately trying to save money to help his ailing mother in need of surgery; Binj, a young Palestinian who only wants to be with his Jewish girlfriend - until his brother is arrested for murder; and finally Dando, the Jewish cop whose brother was the victim of a Palestinian ambush.

Much like David Simon's groundbreaking TV show, The Wire, Ajami introduces us to a multitude of characters, with a complex set of interrelations and entanglements. Each character is fully subjectvised and open to sympathy. Not to mention that the film is set in a worl seemingly run by guns, drugs and shekels. But while it may lack The Wire's broad brush strokes, its penetration into every level of society, Ajami makes up for it with a sense its sense of realism. With an entirely nonprofessional cast, taken from the area in question, intensely workshopped for ten months, Ajami makes The Wire and its occasionally somewhat dubious Baltimore accents look like Dixon of Dock Green.

Likewise the writer director duo, one of them Arab, the other Jewish, are from Ajami themselves, and there is a genuine sense of anecdote to the stories. With its cross-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic cast and crew, then, Ajami is itself an exercise, much like Daniel Barenboim's East-West Divan Orchestra, in using the arts as a bridge across the broken society of Israel-Palestine. Ironically, what the film communicates, perhaps more than anything is the sense of two cities co-existing in the same space, but scarcely communicating with each other, except when things break down, as in the theme of China Mieville's latest book, The City and the City.