A bridge over troubled water? Loving jews and muslims in two recent mediterranean films

This chapter focuses on the way the blend of different aesthetics creates an ethical, perhaps even utopian time that leads from the narrow time of the individual towards a broader, transcendental time, in Emmanuel Levinas phrase: the time of the other. The films discussed in the chapter are structured according to the mosaic film genre, which has become common in the past few years, especially in American cinema: they present polyphony of protagonists, plots, and stories unfolding in diverse settings, apparently without a unifying center. The Israeli films discussed in the chapter tries to shape such a transcendental utopian time by integrating the aesthetics of European and American films. In certain films, the wall that separates people is the Separation Barrier that keeps apart Jews and Arabs, Palestinians and Israelis. In films made in the 1980s, the utopia of national revival while making the desert bloom is replaced by a utopia of different peoples Jew’s and Arab’s uniting.