"Dancing in Jaffa" Movie Review

            “Dancing in Jaffa,” directed by Hilla Medalia was a profoundly impactful documentary for me. The purpose of the film was for Pierre Dulaine, a famous ballroom dancer, to return to his childhood home of Jaffa in an attempt to teach young Jewish and Arab children to ballroom dance. Pierre’s mother was Palestinian and his father was Irish and Pierre spent a majority of his life living in the United Kingdom. Ultimately, Pierre’s dance program lasted ten weeks and culminated with a competition between the various schools, but also involved kids from different schools to touch each other and dance with each other. The documentary followed a few Israeli and Palestinian schools, including one school that was both Jewish and Palestinian. There were also three children that were featured a bit more than the others and they were Noor, a troubled young Muslim, Lois, a Jewish girl, and Alaa, an Arab boy. Noor, who begins the film with zero friends whatsoever, ends up becoming friends with Lois. Lois also befriends Alaa when they become dance partners for the dance competition.

            From a cinema standpoint, some parts of the documentary could have been better, as far as explaining the story line. However, the point gets across nonetheless and creates a compelling story to shed light on the political situation in Israel and Palestine. Watching the movie for a second time definitely clarifies some details. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the kids interact with each other at times, doing many of the things I did as a child and having the same thoughts that I did at those ages. It was also eye-opening to see some of the peaceful protests in the city, reminding me that this is a real, physical conflict that is happening around the world, and that it is not just something I read about in the news. These are real people’s lives.

            For many students, this program means literally “dancing with the enemy.” There were parents and children alike who resisted and almost made Pierre end the program prematurely. Participation in this program crosses cultural, political, and religious boundaries for many, so it is understandable that there would be opposition to it. Throughout the weeks, Pierre diligently works with the children from different schools and slowly begins to break down walls and barriers between them. The idea of pairing different schools together for the competition is genius because it gets the parents to form an alliance of sorts with each other. They both want their children to dance well so they must cheer with other parents they might normally avoid.

            Throughout the movie, Pierre comments a couple times on his own thoughts on the politics of it all by saying “I am not here for politics. This is how they feel and you cannot change a person’s feeling… They learn to trust, and finally learn to respect other people. This is my hope.” Later on, Pierre speaks to the children directly and says “I don’t want to hear Jew, Arab, Arab, Jew. You’re all the same! You understand?” At one point, Lois is having a discussion with her mother and asks if Arab is a religion. In addition, one of the young girls says “If my dad sees me with an Arab, he’ll kill me! A Jew with an Arab…” These comments lead me to believe that these children don’t know much about the political differences between Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Israelis, etc. What prejudices they do have are all learned from their parents and adult figures in their lives. Because Pierre is working with children to change their attitudes and prejudices, I believe he is doing a great service by planting seeds of love and positive attitudes in these children at a young age. He is teaching them that even though they are different and may not believe the same things, they still share certain things in common and they can love each other nonetheless.

            At the end of the film, some of the children share their thoughts on the whole dancing program, and though some students were apprehensive at first, they said things such as “I like that the Jews and Arabs came together” and “At first we were strangers but then we became friends.” Pierre himself commented to the camera during the competition and said “For me to see this [dance competition], actually happening in reality, a Jewish person dancing with an Arab person, Jewish parents sitting with Arab parents, if I was not the emcee, I would be crying.” In essence, the whole idea of the dance competition was risky because it could have created conflict between various people. However, it ended up working out for Pierre and his program. To this day, over 1000 children have learned to dance through this program. Lois, when asked about the most important thing she learned through ballroom dance, put it best by saying she learned “to trust one another.” I don’t know all the details of this conflict and nor do I have all the answers on how to solve it; however, I believe that if more people started to think like these children and began to love and trust one another, it would help break down the hatred that fuels the conflict.