In Jerusalem, the tramway connects several neighborhoods from east to west, recording their variety and differences. This comedy humorously observes moments of daily life from a few passengers, brief encounters that occur along the journey and reveal a whole mosaic of human beings.
A film dedicated to this mosaic of individuals who take the tramway in the city, this “global mix,” says Gitai, consists of both religious and secular people, Palestinians and Israelis, who use this mode of transportation that didn’t even exist the last time Amos Gitai shot a film in Jerusalem.
For forty years, Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai, a former Yom Kippur combatant and apostle of peace, has been casting his cinematic gaze on the upheavals of the Middle East.
To do so, he places his camera at the heart of the newly introduced tramway in Jerusalem, a spiritual city that hosts the great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and where people and socio-economic groups from all backgrounds mingle. To closely follow the life slices of its inhabitants, he follows the journey of the travelers in a tram, a confined space that imposes constant proximity.
Demonstrating a somewhat contagious optimism, he thus envisions the possibility of peaceful coexistence between the populations. From the Palestinian neighborhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanina in the East to Mount Herzl in West Jerusalem, the conversations are the same: sports, politics, family life, love stories. Men approach women clumsily (with an attitude that the sexually correct European mindset wouldn’t hesitate to qualify as harassment), while the women turn away from them to discuss shopping or beauty care with a friend they met by chance.
Some continue to highlight the differences between people to stir up, fortunately without much success, hatred, and they briefly disrupt the lethargy of this means of transport similar to that in many countries. Although the pride of the director in having enlisted the services of some cosmopolitan artistic figures is palpable, these figures, however, do not significantly enrich this array of interchangeable characters.
