A Borrowed Identity
Directed by Eran Riklis
Opens June 26 at Lincoln Plaza
A Borrowed Identity is this film’s US title, adopted to circumvent the kind of cultural misunderstanding the film itself is meant to be about. The source material—a semi-autobiographical novel by Arab Israeli journalist Sayed Kashua—is called Dancing Arabs, and that’s the title Eran Riklis’s movie bore when its screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival was postponed, last year, in light of recent events: the killing of three Jewish Israeli teenagers, the retaliatory killing of a Palestinian teen, the bombs and rockets splitting the sky all summer. The guiding fear, at home and abroad, seems to be that onscreen fictions will look either too real or too distorted when projected onto actual carnage; either way, somebody may complain.
