‘The Band’s Visit’

Left to Right: Sasson Gabai as Tewfiq, Saleh Bakri as Haled, Khalifa Natour as Simon, Imad Jabarin as Camal and Eyad Sheety as Saleh

Sasson Gabai as Tewfiq Saleh Bakri

Sasson Gabai as Tewfiq, Ronit Elkabetz as Dina and Rubi Moscovitz as Itzik

The band arrives

Left: Rubi Moscovich as Itzik Middle: Ronit Elkabetz as Dina Right: Shlomi Avraham as Papi

Director Eran Kolirin

Ronit Elkabetz as Dina

Ronit Elkabetz as Dina and Sasson Gabai as Tewfiq

Saleh Bakri as Haled and Shlomi Avraham as Papi

Saleh Bakri as Haled and Tal Levy as Girl

Saleh Bakri as Haled, Shlomi Avraham as Papi and Rinat Matatov as Yula

Sasson Gabai as Tewfiq

Sasson Gabai as Tewfiq, Ronit, Elkabetz as Dina and Saleh Bakri as Haled

Sasson Gabai as Tewfiq and Ronit Elkabetz as Dina

Khalifa Natour as Simon Imad Jabarin as Camal and Hisham Khoury as Fauzi

Imad Jabarin as Camal and Itzik Konfino as Tzhai

Rubi Moscovitz as Itzik, Uri Gabriel as Avrum, Hila Surjon as Iris and Ahouva Keren as Lea

Khalifa Natour as Simon, Imad Jabarin as Camal, Hisham Khoury as Fauzi, Hila Surjon as Iris, Ahouva Keren as Lea and Uri Gabriel as Avrum

From Sony Classics:

Director Eron Kolirin writes:

When I was a kid, my family and I used to watch Egyptian movies. This was a fairly common Israeli family
practice circa early 1980’s. In the late afternoon on Friday’s we’d watch with bated breaths the convoluted
plots, the impossible loves and the heart-breaking pain of Omar Sharif, Pathen Hamama, I’del Imam, and the
rest of that crew on the one and only TV channel that the country had. This was kind of weird, actually, for
a country that spent half of its existence in a state of war with Egypt, and the other half in a sort of cold,
correct peace with its neighbor to the south.
Sometimes, after the Arab movie, they’d broadcast a performance of the Israeli Broadcasting Authority’s
orchestra. This was a classical Arab orchestra, made up almost entirely of Arab Jews from Iraq and Egypt.
When you think of the IBA orchestra, maybe the custom of watching Egyptian movies ceremony sounds a
little less odd.
The Arab movie has long since disappeared from our screens. TV became privatized, and has sunk out
there among the fifty seven or who knows how many channels that have descended on us.
And then the IBA orchestra was disbanded. We got MTV and BBC and RTL and “Israeli Idol” and pop songs
and 30-second commercials. So who cares about quarter-tone songs that last half an hour any more?
Afterwards, Israel built the new airport, and they forgot to translate the road signs into Arabic. Among the
thousands of shops they built there, they found no room for the strange, curling script that is the mother
tongue of half our population.
A lot of movies have been made touching on the question of why there is no peace, but it seems that fewer
have been made about the question of why we need peace in the first place. The obvious is lost on us in
the midst of conversations centering on economic advantages and interests. At the end of the day, my son
and my neighbor’s son will meet, I am sure of that, in some neon-blinking mall under a giant McDonald’s
sign. Maybe that’s some kind of comfort, I don’t know. What’s certain though is that we’ve lost something
on the way. We traded true-love for the one-night stands, art for commerce, and human connection, the
magic of conversation for the question of how big a slice of the pie we can put our hands on.