Local Angel

April 5, 2007
Little Theatre, National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai

Local Angel, a new film from New York-based Israeli artist Udi Aloni, is not an easy work to characterize. It’s a documentary about the root causes and present contradictions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a deeply personal odyssey of discovery, and a surreal work of art combining poetry, music, and images both beautiful and horrific. While its subtitle is “Theological Political Fragments,” the film ends by tying its many elements together in ways the viewer may not expect. The heart of the film is Udi’s effort to understand the theological-political background he inherited from his mother, Shulamit Aloni, founder of the Israeli Civil Rights Movement and a leading peace activist. The film includes wide-ranging discussions with Hanan Ashrawi – in many ways a Palestinian sister of Shulamit – and chairman Yaw Arafat, which are further buttressed with the observations of leading progressive Israeli and Palestinian scholars. Like a large, complicated canvas by a master painter, Local Angel is both challenging to the observer, and deeply moving. It is a generous, lush, imaginative creation, a feast for the senses which capable of restoring our faith in the human spirit.