***** The New York Times, March 5, 2004 MOVIE REVIEW | 'JAMES' JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM' For One Earnest Pilgrim, No Land of Milk and Honey By A. O. SCOTT
It is hard these days to imagine Jerusalem without thinking about the grim modern realities of political violence and ethnic hatred. But for the hero of "James' Journey to Jerusalem," a young African Christian who wants to become a pastor, the city retains its aura of almost otherworldly holiness.
At the beginning of this touching and insightful film by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, the prologue to James's story is related like a folk tale, accompanied by brightly painted pictures and an ecstatic African chorus. James (Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe), his open, eager face framed by short dreadlocks, is an old-fashioned religious pilgrim and also a kind of holy innocent.
The reality he encounters on his way to the promised land, however, is thoroughly secular, not to say sinful. Interviewed by a bored immigration officer, James expresses enthusiasm at meeting one of God's chosen people, and amazement that he has at last arrived in the place he has read so much about in the Bible. The officer, however, informs him that she has heard all that Holy Land business many times before, and James, denied entry into Israel, is locked in a holding cell with other illegal immigrants, who have come to the country on more mundane pilgrimages.
Soon he is bailed out by a businessman named Shimi (Salim Daw), who keeps a ready supply of illegal laborers in a cramped apartment and hires them out as construction workers and housecleaners, holding onto their passports and paying them in cash and humiliation.
What follows is somewhat predictable but nonetheless affecting. James is good-hearted and guileless, but Israeli society, as depicted by Mr. Alexandrowicz with a relentlessness that might be offensive coming from an outsider, is organized around guile. "Don't be a frayer," advises Shimi's father (Arie Elias), a crusty old Zionist whose small, cherished garden James tends. The word, one of the film's touchstones, might be translated as sucker or patsy.
James's innate honesty turns out to be a clever strategy, and before long he is thriving in the grasping, Darwinian world of the Israeli informal economy. His rise - he becomes superintendent of the workers' dormitory and then, behind Shimi's back, a successful broker in black-market African labor - is both a classic immigrant success story and a grainy video illustration of Max Weber's "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."
Unsurprisingly, James's material ascent, fueled by the glittering consumer goods displayed in the high-rise shopping mall he visits on his day off, is also a spiritual fall. He forgets Jerusalem and spends his money on clothes and cellphones. Once the pride and joy of his village, he becomes a big shot in the local congregation of African migrants, donating money and recruiting new workers for his enterprise.
If he succumbs to temptation, James is also betrayed by the hypocrisy and petty racism that surround him. Shimi's father takes his protégé's transformation into the opposite of a frayer - a macher, perhaps - as a personal affront, and the boundaries of class prove much harder to cross than national borders. To Shimi and his friends, James belongs to a limitless, exploitable and renewable group, whose members can always be shipped back where they came from if they assert their humanity.
As social criticism - not only of Israel, but of other affluent countries as well - "James' Journey, which opens today in Manhattan," is both potent and a little didactic. Were it not for Mr. Shibe's sly subtlety, James's smiling naïveté might have slid easily into caricature. As it is, the contrast between his radiant religiosity and the grubby materialism of the Israelis seems exaggerated, and the smudged, shaky video photography feels like a deliberate attempt to emphasize the ugliness into which James is plunged.
But the film's moral, which goes well beyond the particularities of its setting, is both clear and hard to shake: it is not so much that the love of wealth weakens the love of God, but rather that the pursuit of money, which in our modern societies is a condition not just of comfort but of survival, undermines the capacity for friendship and fellow feeling.
JAMES' JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM
Directed by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz; written (in Hebrew, English and Zulu, with English subtitles) by Mr. Alexandrowicz and Sami Duenias; director of photography, Shark De-Mayo; edited by Ron Goldman; music by Ehud Banay, Gil Smetana and Noam Halevi; production designer, Amir Dov Pick; produced by Amir Harel; released by Zeitgeist Films. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 87 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe (James), Arie Elias (Sallah) and Salim Daw (Shimi).
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/05/movies/05JAME.html> *****
***** About a Goy The passion of the naïf: A Christian Zulu makes a pilgrimage to the broken-promise land by J. Hoberman March 3 - 9, 2004
James' Journey to Jerusalem Directed by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz Zeitgeist Opens March 5, Film Forum
A young Zulu, devoutly Christian and the pride of his South African village, makes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land -- with tragicomic results. James' Journey to Jerusalem, the first dramatic feature by 34-year-old Israeli director Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, is a deceptively modest fable of innocence abroad that resonates with the situation within Israel and without.
Mutual misunderstandings begin the moment that wide-eyed James (Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe), resplendent in his traditional robe, deplanes in Tel Aviv. "Are you a Hebrew woman?" he excitedly asks the bored Israeli soldier at passport control. He imagines her an exotic biblical heroine from the Land of Milk and Honey; she assumes he's looking for illegal work. ("We barely get by in this godforsaken place," another soldier says.) Despite James's protests that he's on a pilgrimage, or perhaps because of them, he winds up in a sort of international holding pen.
Could this actually happen or is it a metaphor? Despite Alexandrowicz's documentary background, James' Journey to Jerusalem is not a naturalistic movie about the plight of imported or undocumented labor in contemporary Israel. Thanks to his evident virtue and fluent English, James is selected by Shimi the contractor (Arab actor Salim Daw) and taken through the cruddy backstreets of Tel Aviv to the hostel where this harried guardian angel warehouses his exploited employees. Initially regarding Shimi as his savior, James is only somewhat disabused when he's put to work as a menial laborer. He accepts this as a necessary preparation, although the seeds of disillusion have been sowed: "If I tell [the people of my village] how it is in this place, they won't believe me. They'll be mad at me."
Alexandrowicz's deeply involving yet unpretentious documentaries, Martin and The Inner Tour, raised human interest stories to the level of revelation. Shot just before the intifada of September 2000 would have made it impossible, The Inner Tour follows a mixed group of Palestinians across the Green Line and through the looking glass on their first trip to Israel; Martin is a haunting portrait of an ex-Dachau inmate who, in effect, has never left the concentration camp. Similarly, James' Journey is shot on DV in a loose, informal style that showcases Shibe's focused, remarkably natural performance.
James is a naïf. In Yiddish literature his prototype would be the protagonist of Mendele Moykher Sforim's late-19th-century satire Benjamin III, who leaves his Russian shtetl on a search for the legendary "red Jews." But unlike Mendele's Benjamin, James is also industrious and intelligent. (Nor is James the primary target of Alexandrowicz's humor.) Shimi is so impressed that he assigns James the task of looking after his irascible father, Sallah (Arie Elias). The old man, whose name recalls the most popular Israeli movie character of the innocent, pre-Six Day War '60s, lives in a shack on a derelict patch of land; with his uncanny luck, James makes the garden bloom.
In a sense, James' Journey dramatizes the Jerusalem syndrome -- a form of delusion first identified in the 1930s wherein tourists to Jerusalem begin to believe they are living in biblical times. (An unkind view of Zionism might find the entire enterprise a version of the syndrome.) But as unexpectedly lighthearted as James' Journey can be, it carries a measure of allegory. The appealing hero is a model Christian more than once compared to Jesus -- and held as a near-slave by mercenary Jews who would hardly seem out of place in The Passion of the Christ. At the same time, James's yearning for Jerusalem is profoundly Jewish; indeed, in his optimistic idealism and capacity for hard work, he is also equated with the original Zionist settlers.
Thus, Alexandrowicz uses James's education to criticize a society that has long since lost its communitarian spirit and socialist ethos. Profit is the only concern and everyone is viewed as a potential frayer (the Hebrew term for "sucker," often applied to new immigrants). Over the course of his journey, James learns how to make and spend money, but mainly he learns how not to be a frayer. The transformation may be too complete, but the movie is, after all, a fable; the economic history that it telescopes is by no means restricted to Israel.
<http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0409/hoberman.php> *****
***** Voiceover by Anthony Kaufman A young Israeli director ponders lost dreams and greedy realities March 3 - 9, 2004
If I wanted to make a film about migrant labor in my country, I would have made a documentary," says Israeli filmmaker Ra'anan Alexandrowicz. "But James' Journey to Jerusalem is really an economic fairy tale about how money influences human behavior and what happens to our dreams when we want to make them true."
The 34-year-old Alexandrowicz is best known for Martin and The Inner Tour -- documentaries that bear little outward resemblance to James' Journey, his affable fiction debut about an African pilgrim who visits Israel and inadvertently becomes an illegal worker. But all three films examine issues of disillusionment, or as Alexandrowicz admits, "the gap between the ideal and the reality." While Martin focuses on a Dachau tour guide who may be lying about his experiences in the Holocaust and The Inner Tour chronicles a busload of Palestinian tourists seeing how the other half lives, the new film is about a man whose dreams about the "Holy Land" don't match the grubby and greedy actuality.
Alexandrowicz sees the same illusory ideals in the "Zionist dream" of a Jewish state. "There's this very spiritual and pure dream about a place," he explains, "but as you deal with the friction of reality, not only does the dream change, but you change." For Alexandrowicz, the Zionist model collapses not only because of Israel's unfair treatment of the Palestinians, "but also how the state that was supposed to fulfill the Zionist dream is actually fulfilling the American Dream."
As James gets sidetracked, he goes from devout Christian to thriving Tel Aviv entrepreneur: Religion gets waylaid in favor of a new TV. But Alexandrowicz points out that he's not making a critique of capitalism. "I'm part of that system," he says. "Money is a very strong thing and there's something very human about how tempting it is." In Israel, Alexandrowicz says, such problems of "economic motivation" are intensified by an obsession with not being a frayer, a Hebrew word that pops up in the film and translates to "pushover" or "sucker." "A lot of our politics is based on not being frayers," he says, "because we have been such ultimate frayers in the past -- the Holocaust as the basic Jewish trauma of being pushed over in the worst way."
More fun than the political subtexts suggest, James' Journey succeeds because it doesn't preach. "The best way to convey an idea is through entertainment that hurts you on one hand, but makes you laugh on the other," says Alexandrowicz, citing as an example Ephraim Kishon's 1964 satire Sallah Shabati, about a Jewish family who emigrate from Morocco to Israel in the early 1950s. (As homage, Alexandrowicz names one of his central characters Sallah.) "In that film," he says, "Sallah and his son are sitting in a refugee camp in the rain, and the son asks his father, 'Why are they treating us like this?' And Sallah says, 'Don't worry, son, now we are the newest ones here, so they're all screwing us. But one day, there will be newer people here and then we'll screw them.' " Adds Alexandrowicz, "And I think this is true of every immigrant society, certainly true of the United States, Europe, and also of Israel."
<http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0409/kaufman.php> ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>