യാത്ര

The Band's Visit (2007)"Bikur Ha-Tizmoret" (original title)

The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, consisting 

of eight men, arrive in Israel from Egypt. They have been booked by an Arab cultural center in Petah Tiqva, but through a miscommunication (Arabic has no "p" sound, and regularly replaces it with "b"), the band takes a bus to Bet Hatikva, a fictional town in the middle of the Negev Desert. There is no transportation out of the citythat day, and there are no hotels for them to spend the night in. The band members dine at a small restaurant where the owner, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) invites them to stay the night at her apartment, at her friends' apartment, and in the restaurant. That night challenges all of the characters.  The Band’s Visit has not provided any of the narrative payoffs we might have expected, but has provided something more valuable: An interlude involving two “enemies,”Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.