joined by two of our regular panelist this evening bob brown and marilyn campbell now tonight we're going to be discussing a film called a draw me i'm not sure i have a pronunciation right it's a an israeli film made by two directors one is in the israeli jew the other an israeli arab and they work together on this film for seven years with primarily nonprofessional actors and it was very difficult to summarize because it's one of these films that has many characters and interlocking stories and it's also to make it even more complicated told in chapters that are out of chronological order but what's interesting about these chapters is that first you'll see an event or some sort of event from the point of view of one group of people and then you'll see the event again in the perspective of the people in the film are very poor or unemployed or employed in this informal economy where they're off the being paid off the books or they're being paid nothing except they're working off a debt to some  guy the film begins with a random killing in the street in revenge for someone who who shot somebody else and then their whole family is in trouble and is going to be shot and less they pay big money to the bed winds who are apparently or this sort of organized crime group in this area so those those that family has to struggle to pay back their debt then there's another family where the young boy is sent across the border from the palestinian territories and he's working illegally for a restaurant for an arab christian because he has to earn money to get his mother an operation and then there are drug dealers and their policemen and everyone has everyone has problems but they're not at all sympathetic to the other person's problems because they just don't see the other side as even being human at one point one of the characters who is a young girl who's in love with a lower class and muslim boy has an arab christian says to her father they are human you know and her father has no they're  not and that's i think basically what you see is the sad story of what's going on in the middle east is that even though all of these families have all kinds of parallels between them they all have mothers they whole have you know they have mothers and fathers and families and troubles and illnesses and and death and tragedies in their lives and yet the only thing the other people can see about them is their oppressing them or they're the enemy in that sort of thing and that's what the course with the film is trying to convey is that we have to get back to seeing each other as human beings with the same well and actually not just human beings these people all look like they could be from the same family they're all semites but there are divisions cultural traditions religious traditions they're entrenched and so did you you're the audience is  is kind of plunged into these people's lives without knowing totally what their background is in some cases you really don't know whether they're a christian arab or a muslim arab or even just a jew israeli  until later on when as you say these things are out of chronological order did you feel that do you feel frustrated by the fact that these people are all semitic and yet they're not able to get along and they're not able to bridge these divides i was confused at first as marilyn said the narrative is chopped up and rearranged chronologically so when you've got a lot of people who look alike they've got a lot of the same problems the first issue was who's who and what's what who's brother is yeah and i tell you frankly i wasn't enjoying the film for the first half because of that because i was so confused and because it's done in such a semi documentary style that you're thrown off base but as the narratives come come full circle to each other things begin to clear up and you get homu months where you see i've been tricked into thinking because i've been seeing this one slice that this is what the truth is but no it's quite the opposite or from the obvious point of view this person is sympathetic whereas i thought this person was a beast and i'm wondering director writers deliberately wanted us to misjudge people oh with an innocent question and i think maybe that's true i think that it's a literally and something that you see something from a different angle and that that you see from one angle new thing you're not sure who shot who and then later on you'll see it from from an angle where you can see who did the shooting and backs and then and then as you say things documentary idea is that nothing's explained there's no real exposition you know if it's down and said well you know i was born here and then i moved here and that's why i  arabic and hebrew because this happened you just have to have to pick up those clues from ordinary conversations and they're kind of ordinary conversations between mostly  young men of teenage through say early twenty's that are cooked have these completely pro forma conversations with slang and with you know drug ar and references to video games and it's not like they sit down and you know talk to one another in ways that where they explain how they're feeling or what they're thinking it's all it's all on the side of  at first he was a drug dealing rat me to you know us and exactly and we also misjudged i think who ended him yes or what ended him so you do sort of reckon with yourself oh am i jumping to conclusions about also have that problem they just have a little bit of information or rumor and they make assumptions based on that based and based on their stereotypes and their prejudices against the other side oh well this this guy is only interested in in oppressing me or you know this cop is is just if it's just a complete fascist bastard and they will they ever see anything to explain the way he behaves the way he behaves and what is going on in his life right maybe making him a little more trigger happy than he would have been right ordinarily or or the tender side of his life which you see in one of the middle of the film i wonder if they were inspired at all by the crash the film about elway that has the same sort of approach to this where you've got different slices of life but about babel battle absolutely sure it takes place  same thing yeah and you've got different viewpoints and you you make judgments and then they're turned on their head actually like this better than either of those films because i think this film i think was more consistent using that narrative in order to do that whereas in crash the quinces are just totally yeah oh yeah you know los angeles it's very good in that it was almost like twelve million people write the same eight are not going to keep crashing into one that somehow you don't feel manipulated in this one the same way right and you actually are the one who's responsible for seeing at a certain way right and making sense and making sense of it and it being spoonfed yeah right  end because what i think what you're saying is the type of filmmaking in which people exist on the periphery of other people's lives and everybody's everyone every action that someone takes has a ripple effect it affects other people  but and in those cases it's also more believable that the four or five stories that they show would intersect because they're all dealing drugs in this one housing project and  in the middle of the night and keeping people often in battle it's just sheer coincidence that people who are completely unconnected i mean would be unconnected in life perhaps poor get thrown together in these random ways but here you're right they're living on top of each other and i wanted to ask you whether you felt that i put this this living on top of each other with very little hope of economic success or financial success or getting out of the life that they're in or getting out of the rut that they're in is that what is forcing them into these gang like divisions or is it the cultural the religious you know one of the you get the feeling that even that none of these people would really be consumed by hatred for the others except that they're living on top of each other like you say and if they had hope that there's a limited number of  way with no education no connections that they can get that kind of a job that they're ever going to be able to cumulate that kind of money which means what's your what's the crime is your only option and your crime is interesting scene a very it's a scene actually i think we as the audience dread feel dread throughout about us and israeli man who is just reading very mildly expressing his concern police come in and and then you know and then that the crowd becomes an inflamed and more than one way and and that's this same sort of thing you have two groups intensely suspicious of each other's intention and all you need is it is as simple as a tiny argument and then you've got a tragedy on your hands and i think you also should also mention that the besides th israelis which we see mainly as police there's all these divisions within the arab community between the bedouins who are some sort of try there's some sort of tribal organized crime family and then there's the christians who the man who owns the restaurant that's employing all these unfortunate poor people and he's kind of exploiting them in there but they have no choice and  illegally in in israel he's he's crept over from the territories in order to get a job and get some work and earn some money and omar is it's from israel but he's also poor and has you know no family and and he has no you know money and he needs it you need to pay off this debt he's humiliated and then the other sort of layabouts in the street who are or were less so much less sympathetic because they seem to have given up the idea of know this you were talking about the socioeconomic divisions and one of the one of the early problems in the film is that there's a murder that starts out of a drive by shooting and so there's got to be justice but in order the guy who is really the supposed to be the victim needs protection but in order to get the protection he's got to get a fixer who knows who can protect him and for what price and then we've also got to pay off the family who are going to make the hit unless they get the the dough so we sit there and we watch this group meeting with all the elders and they're all dickering over the and talking about camel equivalencies and how much is owed to god and then sort of dickering our how much our law gets us as everybody else but you can't be caught out entirely so well i l thousand all right seven thousand so if you're a very biblical or otherwise ancient middle east the idea that families but it's the family that's the important unit and if you've a family can offend another family and it pays the least bit of attention to her or and no one pays any attention to or the women there be to be protected only has to be protected but paid attention to what their wants are and that they might have an idea of doing something better no end is it ends in hugs and kisses right right only among the men right you know hugging and kissing them when speaking of family there are some scenes i wanted to ask you about this this fairly brutal israeli couple's name is  dando and who i think you mentioned in summary was a cop in israel we don't particularly like him for what we've seen so far but of course again the chronology is mixed up but then we see him at home he's very devoted to his two little children and to his wife and we see him bathing his toddler age daughter in the most adorable sensitive and loving way there's also a scene of a muslim boy sponging his grandfather his elderly grandfather  and we meant to feel that in fact family is all that matters that in the end that is what we should attach everything to i think we are in one sense supposed to think that because the bonds between the families are obviously so strong and so and so were but it's also putting these people under obligations to a family that that the weight of them is very hard on them i also think it's just showing that even though they don't understand each other they are going through the same kinds of things there's tenderness and there's love and there's there's there's responsibility and you know the idea that you have to take care of people is through out but they don't see that they don't see the each other as humans and see that those commonalities when they were in dealing with the other side they think that the only their side is the victim well and then of course there are the cases where people do cross the lines where you have been jazz or say who has in it a jewish girlfriend and then that case he is caught between all of his friends that's right he will have nothing and she can't be family because she's jewish so you have well she's alive but then but then at some point in fact the cat cops break in on him and his brother his about the filmmaking the directors as i said worked for seven years with these nonprofessional actors or at least most of them and you know the sort of mike lee way in which they were just given scenes to improvise without really knowing what was coming next and i think that carried through into the actual filming part they didn't really know what was going to happen at any one time did that work well you know yeah i think it gave a real feeling of spontaneity and you were always on edge knowing nobody telegraphed anything ahead because they couldn't they didn't know either they might have known the situation but they didn't know how it was going to well and i think weren't saying lines they had memorize start interrupting each other that the scene where the christian arab father is telling his daughter that she cannot even think about dating nevermind marrying muslim arab and he just he gets they both got so carried away that it was just like you know it's a fight a family sadly and you know i just want to i just want to make sure that our audience knows what the if you like good acting i mean the acting in this i think is absolutely impeccable i don't think there was a false no that sounds like a cliche but i just was completely captivated by the actors who were living their lives i mean these people were not  where where if after you've gotten used to them after the years and years you just forget maybe so i'm thinking that film by steven soderbergh where he had nonprofessional actors in a little town and i guess it was upstate new york and  bubble and then see them together and there's where you felt these people know they're on camera they're trying to be good actors and they're kind of restrained a lot of the time yeah well part of it part of this is that he did so many films that his intention was to put the audience to make the audience understand what it was to be the other that was what the purpose of the film was and of course we know that during the filmmaking process this must have happened because these were these  two groups of people who were really forced to see to ensure that a lot of the acting exercises did you feel that when you were watching it we don't have much time so i don't know i'm wondering if the people who are doing one scene from one point of view ever got to see the other side yeah that's right  yeah i i i felt that it was definitely not conveyed that the people in the characters in the film understood what was going on that was the point they did they saw things from their point of view and they didn't stand it but you sitting back in audience right that that is what you wanted that's the person who can look at the different prints that point of view and say oh gosh if they had only known this then they they wouldn't be longer heads all the time they wouldn't be these conflicts they'd understand what was going on in the other person's life but they don't think they don't cross the line and i hope that this act of making this film this humane and humanitarian project bringing these two groups together will somehow be something you know we can hope will pere made these communities but it doesn't exist now with the modern family in israel so it is the most popular  i did too i did too well that brings us to the end of this little workshop and i just want to persuade our viewers this film is playing in our area still and i really want