Surprisingly incoherent and boring

hyped garbage

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Dror Zahavi's For My Father is a thoughtful and moving Israeli film that balances the Jewish and Palestinian perspectives. As the title suggests, the two central characters take opposite positions vis a vis their duty to their respective fathers. Tarek agrees to become a suicide bomber to restore his father's reputation in the Palestinian community. His father was assaulted when discovered to have served the Israelis in order to facilitate Tarek's travel for his promising football career. His parents don't know his plan but beg him to return home safely. The beautiful 17-year-old Keren revolted against her father's orthodox Judaism and lives banished from her family. This mother too begs her child to return home. Their respective fathers' positions prevent them. Though we don't see Keren's father, his grip is personified by the young orthodox vigilantes who physically threaten Keren if she doesn't abandon her secular independence and submit to her father — and them. A lasciviousness and cruelty undermine their ostensible righteousness.When the now ambivalent Arab terrorist and the Jewish beauty meet, both are outsiders in their own communities. Each is pressured to submit to the will of their respective forbears, their societies' traditions — i.e., fathers. Having originally dismissed Terek, Keren comes to appreciate him, especially after he drives off her tormentors. After their brief idyllic escape, her tormentors have their way. They persuade the neighbourhood deputy that Tarek wielded a knife against them (a lie) and that he must be the terrorist known to have snuck into Tel Aviv (the truth, but with an asterisk: he's no longer certain about his suicidal and murderous mission). The pivotal supporting character is old man Katz. He initially appears as a madman, opening the public mains to waste the water. We learn he and his depressed, indeed suicidal, wife remain in despair over the loss of their soldier son. He died when the army, trying to toughen up their young men, denied him water. This father confronts the traditions that waste the lives of their youth — on either side of the Jewish-Palestinian divide.In Katz Zahavi demonstrates how enemies can bridge their differences, hatreds, cultural inheritances. He figures out why Tarek needs to buy a new detonator from him. But instead of turning him in — as the jealous Jewish vigilantes do — he takes a fatherly interest in the young man and tries to talk him out of his mission. Tarek, who during his enforced weekend in Tel Aviv has experienced the Israeli's humanity, has already modified his mission. He leaves on the beach the nails that would have created massive losses when he blows himself up in the market. His bomb and the army snipers kill only him and wound Katz. To the madness of the continuing 1948 war Katz has lost his new substitute son as well as his own. Karen has lost a potential lover and witnessed another reminder of the extremists' mortal futility — that freezes both sides.

This is not a good film; it is a very, very, good film. Here in the US the Palestinians are painted as pure hateful terrorists killing teenagers in pizza shops. This film is able to show that even suicide bombers are people. The prospective bomber's (Tarek) parents are shown as loving parents and not as fanatics praising dead martyrs and happy if their sons can achieve martyrdom. Tarek himself is a multi-faceted individual, not a focused uneducated fanatic. What I found most interesting are his motives - they have nothing do to with Islam, rather, he is motivated by a sense of family, honor, love of father, and hatred for those that caused the "downfall" of his family and his loss of the opportunity to play soccer. Although his "handlers" are short-sighted and evil people, they make an interesting point when they say "We (the Palestinians) have no Air Force." Indeed, they fight with the few weapons they have. If they had the hardware (and perhaps it is better that they don't), software and training the Israelis have, then their strategy would be quite different.I also liked very much the portrayal of the Israelis. Here we see that they are a complex hardly homogeneous people. Some are disgruntled refugees from other countries and not happy in Israel, some are intolerant believers, some are border atheists, some are smart, some are not so smart, some are trusting, some are suspicious, etc. I especially liked that it portrays the working class area and people of Tel Aviv - a nice change from the million dollar condos on the sea full of American Jews that we normally see on American TV.The acting is tremendous. You sympathize with most every character because the acting is so believable. You don't want any Israeli to die because you see them as real (and innocent) people. You also don't want Tarek to die because he also is real and innocent. Also he is torn between his hatred of all Israelis on one hand while on the other hand he has feelings of no hatred, even love, for those Israelis he meets and gets to know in just a few days.But most of all I so enjoyed Hili Yalon as Keren. One can get lost in her beautiful eyes. Her acting is suburb. She represents so many things - vulnerability, love of parents, non-conformity, naivety, etc.See this film; you won't regret it.

Sof Shavua B'Tel Aviv (2008) is a German-Israeli co-production shown in the U.S. as "For My Father." Directed by Dror Zahavi, the film follows a Palestinian, Tarek (Shredi Jabarin), who is sent to Tel Aviv as a suicide bomber. When the bomb fails to explode, he's left stranded in Tel Aviv until he's able to fix the detonator. The entire movie takes place during Tarek's weekend in Tel Aviv.Director Zahavi pulls off a coup, in that he makes his protagonist's mission understandable. It's hard to think of an audience being sympathetic to a terrorist bomber, but we can at least understand the internal logic behind Tarek's actions, even while we recoil at the thought of the suffering a terrorist bomb will cause.Added to this volatile mixture is a young, liberated Israeli woman, Keren, played by the beautiful Israeli actor Hili Yalon. Naturally, there's a chemistry between the young man and woman, although the differences that separate them make Romeo and Juliet's problems appear trivial by comparison.It's interesting that both Tarek and Keren are not cardboard characters. They have virtues, flaws, and unexpected facets to their personalities. Also interesting is the fact that they both face as much pressure and harassment from their own communities as they do from their counterparts on the other side of the political and cultural divide.We saw this film at the extraordinary Rochester Jewish Film Festival, but it will work well on a small screen. It's a provocative, troubling movie, and worth seeking out and watching.

Seeing this film was a kind of surrealistic experience. On a Friday night in a cinema complex in the center of Tel Aviv, me and my wife were the only two viewers. Private screening. Taking into account that our tickets were not even paid by us but won on a raffle by the Tel Aviv edition of Time Out, this film does not seem to enjoy commercial success.It is certainly deserving more. This film is one in a row of films that started to appear from both sides of the never ending and violent conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, dealing with one of the most cruel aspects - suicide bombings. The approach that is being taken here is to try to humanize without necessarily explaining or excusing, and combine the story with a romantic line.The result is mixed. The film dares too little, Dror Zahavi who studied and works in Germany made a film that looks unexpectedly like conventional Israeli cinema or even more like Israeli commercial theater. His succeeds in the marginal aspects - the life of low-class Tel Aviv a few hundreds of meters from the glamorous aspects of the largest and most contradictory city in Israel. He succeeds less in the principal conflict and fails to says anything new or unexpected on this line.Zahavi is being helped by a team of experienced actors in the secondary roles - especially Shlomo Vishinsky and Rozina Cambos (this is how her Romanian name is correctly spelled :-)) as a slightly strange, pain and loss-stricken aged couple. Shadi Fahr-Al-Din does what you would expect, while Hili Yalon gives in my opinion the best performance in the movie, as the vulnerable young woman finding strength to fight her destiny of being born in an ultra-orthodox Jewish family and build a life of her own. The problem is that good acting cannot feel for the flaws of the story, and especially of its ending. The conflict in the Middle East is tough and complex. Simple and conventional solutions do not work here. So does not work the ending of this film.