Movie review: Dancing in Jaffa
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: C] Pierre Dulaine returns to his native city to coax students in largely segregated schools to dance together — a challenge in a culture where men won't even shake hands with women.
City Paper grade: C
It’s a story that’s almost become a documentary subgenre: the well-meaning artist who travels to the Middle East, planting the seeds of peace with a project that brings young Palestinians and Israelis together and helps them to realize that maybe they’re not that different after all. In Dancing in Jaffa, that project is ballroom dancing, and the subject of Hilla Medalia’s charming, if lightweight, film is former world champion Pierre Dulaine. A native of Jaffa whose family left Israel in 1948, Dulaine is the founder of Dancing Classrooms, which was the subject of the 2005 documentary Mad Hot Ballroom. He returns to his native city to coax students in largely segregated schools to dance together — a challenge in a culture where men won’t even shake hands with women. Kids being kids, the students reflect their parents’ prejudices and suspicions, though they inevitably begin to warm to one another in the lead-up to the inevitable climactic competition. Medalia focuses on a few of the children and their parents: Noor, an outcast Muslim girl still mourning the death of her father; Alaa, a perpetually beaming Palestinian boy from a poor family; and Lois, a popular blonde Jewish girl who forms a tentative friendship with Alaa. It’s all cute and heartwarming, though the efficacy is undermined in a conversation Dulaine has with a cab driver who lost several friends during his military service, suggesting the hurdles these kids still have to face.
