Heavy beats, attitude, and a powerful emotional punch.
Junction 48, the latest feature from Israeli director Udi Aloni, was screened at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. The film takes an original perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, telling the story of Kareem (Tamer Nafar), a young Palestinian from an Arab ghetto outside Tel Aviv who aspires to become a rapper.
Throughout the film, Kareem’s personality is expressed through his music. He raps about his frustration with the police brutality in his neighborhood and the treatment of himself and his fellow Palestinians by the Israeli government. Junction 48 is one of those rare works that manages to illicit so much empathy and compassion from the audience that preconceptions feel irrelevant while one is watching. In fact, Aloni gave a brief intro speech before the film began where he jubilantly asked the audience to put aside any stereotypes and biases they were harboring while they watched his film.
It would be untrue to call Junction 48 an apolitical film, but the attitude expressed feels warmer and more human than the majority of politically controversial art. In the film, Kareem sits for an interview with a local news station. “My songs aren’t political, they just describe the place I come from,” he explains to the interviewer. Perhaps this also explains the film’s unexpected warmth. By making the audience conscious of the existence of these people and places while not insisting on heavy political debate, the film finds compassion, something that is so often lacking in politics.
Junction 48 is about far more than just a political conflict though. Through Kareem’s songs, we are able to learn so much more about these characters and the issues in their world that are sometimes even larger than the politics.
The song in the final scene expresses Kareem’s desire to write a love song, and laments his inability to do so because he doesn’t know how to properly express his affection. This echoes an earlier sequence when Kareem nearly breaks down to his girlfriend Manar (Samar Qupty) about the bottling up of his emotions. These scenes lend the film its deeper points about gender roles. Kareem is prevented from expressing his emotions by the masculine expectations of his society. Similarly, Manar is forbid from singing with him by her conservative cousins as seeing her appear publicly on a stage would bring shame to her family.
Ultimately, the woman gets the shorter end of the stick. The ambiguous end of the final scene allows the audience to choose for themselves what happens to Manar and whether or not it’s even possible for her to overcome the rigidity of the path her world has laid out for women.
After the screening, the leads and Aloni gave a Q&A, shedding some light on the issues of the film.
“Part of fighting for human rights is fighting for Palestinian rights,” Aloni proclaimed. “I’m a white Israeli Jew, so it’s pure democracy for me. In the West Bank, it doesn’t exist at all. No culture is homogeneous.” The director said he used to spend so much time discussing philosophies of peace that he almost failed to notice that grassroots efforts for peace were taking place all around him.
“For him, he doesn’t want to be political,” Tamer said of his character’s insistence on his music not being political. “I’m not political, but everything is political. He doesn’t want to be political but he’s forced to sing politics,” Tamer elaborated, saying the film is truly about finding humanity in the politics. “I just want to feel like a human being and to fall in love.”
Junction 48 smoothly takes a boatload of issues in the contemporary Palestinian community and sets them to a strong hip-hop beat. It’s not difficult to see why such a film won the Audience Award at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival.
Photo credits: Variety.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4c02MkV75M
