Turn Left at the End
of World

UKJFF | ★★★✩✩

Though the subject is about immigration to Israel, this is no rose-tinted view of what it is to make aliyah. Set in the 1960s against the ochre colours of the Negev desert, Avi Nesher’s 2004 whimsical comedy drama focuses on the lives of two immigrant families. One is an Indian family whose expectations of life in Tel Aviv are dashed when they are shunted off to a frontier town. The other are their new Moroccan neighbours, who view the new arrivals with as much suspicion as they do ignorance. One thinks of Jews arriving in Israel after experiencing racism. Less so of the bigotry that some Jews brought with them.

However, bridging the divide here are the families’ two young daughters Sara and Nicole (Netta Garti and Liraz Charhi) whose instant friendship provides the film’s rites-of-passage heart. Nicole imagines herself as an undiscovered Brigitte Bardot while her sister chooses the more traditional path of getting married.

Meanwhile, Sara is the more grounded of the two in the friendship while her father (Parmeet Sethi) attempts to compensate for the loss of Indian life by establishing the most alien thing one can imagine in the Israeli Negev – a cricket team.

The sport is viewed with deep suspicion by the football-loving Moroccans. But when a delegation from the English consulate provide some serious kit, suddenly the sport is given a status that is slightly above the ridiculous.

With these pleasingly surreal diversions Nesher’s plot drifts amiably between the town’s residents, building a view of Israeli small town life that will be familiar to anyone who saw either the original film version of The Band’s Visit or the subsequent musical adaptation. The humour is either too gentle or broad to be anything more than amusing, however.

I can see why for Israeli audiences a study in the differences between Indian and Moroccan Israeli communities is what gives the film its conflicts and contrasts. But from the diaspora point of view of this reviewer I would have been interested to see the versions of Jewishness that connect the families too. Still, anyone who assumes that an Israeli film must mean a story featuring Jews of European Ashkenazi heritage will be made to think again.