Other Israel Film Festival Spotlight: Transit

I’m delighted to be returning for the fourth time to cover the Other Israel Film Festival, which features a diverse crop of Israeli and Palestinian cinema and is hosted by the JCC Manhattan. The 8th Annual Other Israel Film Festival will take place November 6th-13th, 2014.

Transit
Directed by Hannah Espia
Screening November 7 at 9pm and November 8 at 6pm

This drama does the festival proud with a subject that doesn’t even touch Arab-Israeli relations and instead focuses on a wholly different population: Filipino immigrants. This film chooses a group of characters to be the focal points of its story, each permitted his or her own chapter to more fully fill in the grander vision of being a foreign worker in Israel. The film deals with Israel’s 2009 law permitting for the deportation of the children of foreign workers by showing it in action, contrasting life as an immigrant to Israel with the harsh reality of being back in the Philippines. In some ways, the film doesn’t cover much narrative ground since it retells the bulk of its story several times, but each chapter proves more enlightening and demonstrates the vitality of its characters even in unfortunate circumstances. Most of all, it highlights a section of Israeli society rarely documented.