The Dead of Jaffa

Israeli Director Ram Loevy’s first feature film continues the commitment to speaking for the underclass that defined his remarkable TV career. 

In Jaffa a small store owner reluctantly accedes to his wife’s request that they give safe harbour to three West Bank orphans whose father is jailed for life. The storeowner’s bit part in a British film leads to the oldest child being killed when the staged demonstration overruns the script. Real stones replace the fake. The seething boy takes over the scene. 

In the inner film the British director is retelling his parents’ romance. But he imposes his perspective on that history, against the insistence of his lead star, his daughter playing his mother. 

Contrary to that vapid director’s example, our film’s primary motif is the past governing the present. The dead of Jaffa still hold sway over the living. The merchant dissuades the oldest orphan from staying in the skeletal building next door by warning there are dead people there. The boy later claims to have seen them -- and been given their permission.

That’s the point of the opening anecdote. Wen a graveyard was flooded the dead swim toward the living. The store owner recalls his pledge to his dying father-in-law that he will never leave his wife. He will always protect her. In the closing freeze frame the face earlier cast for its gentle compassion is now a stony resolve. The plot ends open.

The ghost theme is replayed comically when the wife runs amok in the kitchen, covering her and her husband’s faces in flour. They are the living ghosts of the dead who demand their dream be fulfilled.

The Israeli control is summarized in two police. One is a blustering hardline commander. The other is a comical patrolman who plunders the helpless storeowner.  

This very touching, carefully detailed film is a fine example of the Israeli Left’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause. 

         As the opening title declares, the Palestinians have still not achieved the statehood they have pursued since 1948. Framed out of the narrative is the one continuing obstacle to Palestinian statehood. That is their insistence upon replacing Israel not joining her. Their current “From the river to the sea” confirms their rejection of peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state, however many generations of their own lives are wasted.